Jen Myhre
The Natural History of Myth
A new body of mythic hyperrealism brought to life.
I am creating The Natural History of Myth — a large-scale body of hyperreal work that returns ancient beings to the world not as fantasy, but as living presences we once tried to explain through story.
Across cultures and continents, humanity has carried dragons, sirens, gods and goddesses, angels, guardians, monsters, shapeshifters, and impossible creatures through legend. In this collection, they return as if encountered in the natural world — biologically possible, emotionally present, and caught in intimate moments where they seem unaware they are being observed.
These works are not decorative fantasy. They are painted as if they breathe.
Skin, scale, wing, horn, gaze, instinct, beauty, danger, grief, survival — each piece is built to feel discovered rather than invented.
Inside the Collection
Myth is not treated here as invention, but as memory.
Across cultures, continents, and centuries, humanity has recorded beings that return again and again: mermaids, dragons, gods, angels, demons, guardians, monsters, shapeshifters,
and visitors from beyond the known world.
This collection approaches them as living presences —
beings with anatomy, instinct, intelligence, survival, beauty, danger, and history.
Each work is built to feel discovered rather than invented.
The goal is to create a body of work that feels ancient, cinematic, biologically possible,
emotionally charged, and impossible to forget.
These works and concepts represent the beginning of a world being uncovered —
a collection where myth is approached as living presence, biological possibility, and ancient memory.
'The Natural History of Myth'
An Evolving Body of Work
THE AQUATIC BRANCH
Notes on a Parallel Evolution
Long before humanity carved out its first coastal ports, a quiet and radical divergence rewrote the history of the deep. Just as the modern whale traces its ancestry back to a four-legged land mammal that surrendered to the primeval tide, a forgotten branch of the hominid lineage may have turned its back on the savanna to answer the pull of the open ocean.
Over millennia, as we learned to walk, they learned to dive—their bodies refining into streamlined muscle, insulating scales, and an anatomy perfectly calibrated for the crush of the abyss.
To sailors, they were not merely beautiful figures glimpsed at the surface, but dangerous intelligences whose voices could draw men beyond reason, beyond safe water, and into the deep. Their song was not decoration. It was warning, seduction, language, and trap.
The figures ancient cultures pressed into Mesopotamian clay and carved into Syrian stone were not the decorative fantasies of sun-baked sailors, but raw, unfiltered encounters with a parallel evolution. They are our long-lost siblings of the surf, caught in intimate moments of survival, watching us from the edge of a world we left behind.
THE DRAGON QUEST
A Global Chronicle of the Living Sky and Sea
Across every fragmented civilization in human history, separated by vast oceans and insurmountable terrain, our ancestors recorded the exact same memory: a titan of scale, wing, and tooth. From the high-altitude peaks of the Andes to the fertile valleys of ancient China, and from the deep, uncharted oceans to the highest clouds, the dragon has never been a localized fable.
They ruled the sky with a mastery of flight that defied our primitive understanding of aerodynamics, and they commanded the deep seas long before humans learned to sail them. To dismiss this universal architecture of claw and crest as a collective hallucination or a massive global coincidence ignores the glaring simplicity of the historical record.
Every culture drew them, every culture feared them, and every culture revered them for one absolute reason: they were here. They were the apex rulers of a wild world, coexisting alongside early humanity as physical realities of flesh, bone, and breath, leaving a permanent visual scar on our global consciousness.
Beyond The Known World
What Is Truly Out There?
THE UNWRITTEN CHAPTERS
Future Studies in Myth, Memory, and the Unknown
The Natural History of Myth is an expanding body of work. Dragons and mermaids are only the beginning.
Future pieces will move through forest, sky, stone, shadow, divinity, and the unexplained — bringing ancient beings and modern legends into the same visual language of hyperrealism. Each subject will be approached not as costume, fantasy, or spectacle, but as presence: a living form with anatomy, instinct, history, and emotional weight.
Sasquatch, Fairies and wild forest beings.
Gods, goddesses, and divine archetypes.
Medusa, centaurs, angels, demons, and guardians.
Unidentified visitors, fallen craft, and the strange mythologies of the modern age.
Some of these beings come from ancient temples and carved stone. Others come from oral history, wilderness encounters, sacred texts, folklore, or classified imagination. Together, they form a larger question at the heart of the collection:
What if myth was not simply invented, but remembered?
Each future work will be built slowly, with the same devotion to realism, detail, and emotional truth — as though these figures were not symbols, but species, witnesses, survivors, and forgotten relatives of the human story.
Where Legends Breathe
For collectors, galleries, art advisors, curators, designers, publishers, and those who feel connected to the
vision behind this collection, I welcome direct inquiries.
The Natural History of Myth is an evolving body of work — a long-term collection of hyperreal pieces
approaching myth as memory, encounter, and reality being uncovered.
A limited number of signed and numbered fine art editions may be made available as the collection develops.
Select original acquisition, exhibition, representation, and aligned commission inquiries may also be considered.
Whether you are interested in an original work, representation, exhibition opportunity, private acquisition,
or simply beginning a conversation, you are welcome to contact me directly.