Maisie Cousins iconic work can not be confused with any other artists, as her style is extremely intimate and unapologetically confrontational. She uses voyerism to engage her audience and by extremely close up frames places the viewer unnecessarily close to the beautiful/grotesque still life’s she captures. Her close range accentuates the textures of the plants and food- making them feel somewhat uninviting and disgusting. The vibrant colours and heavy use of pink brings a feminine, soft quality to the otherwise disturbing images- I believe Cousins is playing with the fine line between attraction and being put-off (testing her audience). The confusing images provokes the audience to look around the pools of liquid, the soggy food and the floating fruits that drift around her images. I can see a correlation between Cousins concept and my FMP concept- creating an at first glance beautiful, tempting and appealing scene, but the closer you get, the more you see it for what it truly is. Maisie Cousins is redefining femininity and celebrating all elements of the female body that most artists in the world of fashion want to remove or conceal. Working against the ‘industry approved’ version on the woman, Cousins presents the good, the bad and the ugly in her own unique way. Her work has inspired me to incorporate natural elements in my work to shadow the subjects in my illustrations and remind the viewer that it is natural to see all aspects of the female form- not only the filtered and fine tuned versions we see online.