Cassandra Kim’s Whimsical Paintings Draw Attention to Virginia’s Wildlife

By Molly Kirk/DWR

Photos by courtesy of Cassandra Kim

Cassandra Kim, the artist who depicted the Richmond peregrine falcons of Falcon Cam fame to celebrate the 2025 Falcon Cam viewing season, has always had a passion for painting animals, but imagining them in a different way. “When I was my daughters’ age, about eight years old, I was always drawing and painting animals in clothes,” she said.

“I grew up with artists like Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl where animals looked like animals, but were acting like humans. I think that always just kind of stayed with me. I realized I had a better voice painting animals, and I could say better what I wanted that way,” she said. But as Kim developed her art and earned her degree in Communications Art and Design from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, she put her animal visions on the back burner. “I thought, well, that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to be more serious,” she recalled. “It seemed like there were very specific parameters in which art was done. I kind of stuck to those, thinking that’s what I was supposed to do.”

After art school, Kim worked for the Trader Joe’s grocery chain for 14 years, painting murals at their stores. “It was a great job and great training. But I needed to do things specific to their needs,” she noted. When she had her twin daughters in 2016, she couldn’t sustain the travel demands of the Trader Joe’s role. But she kept painting. “I found myself painting these animals in clothes, never knowing that anything was going to be done with them. I had like 20 of these paintings done and turned against the wall that I just kept painting until I kind of stumbled into galleries.”

Kim debuted a public showing of her unique animal portraits at Glave Kocen Gallery in Richmond in 2019. “They were like, ‘This is something. You’ve got a show here.’ And so they kind of helped me kick off my career, and everything just kind of took off,” she said. Since then, Kim’s art has hung in galleries across the United States and in England and her pieces are in much demand. She’s developed a trademark style of placing animals in poses and clothes usually connected to traditional portraiture.

Cassandra Kim’s entry into the 2024 Restore the Wild Artwork Competition, which won the Artistic Expression category.

Her website states that her paintings “explore the unique personalities and characteristics of animals and reflect a lifelong love traditional art. Inspired by the master painters of the past, she seeks to put her own slightly absurd surreal twist on art by replacing animals with people. Pairing an unexpected animal with an image from past societies creates a visual paradox that inadvertently humanizes the portraiture and often makes people smile.”

In recent years, Kim has begun to focus on Virginia native animals and imperiled species as she’s grown more aware of the threats they face. “I care very much about the environment and the ecosystem and animals, so it’s important to me to help people connect with animals,” she said. In 2023, she collaborated with the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR)-Natural Heritage on an exhibit titled “Rare in Virginia,” which featured endangered species in the Commonwealth painted in classical portraiture. She hopes her portraits help the public become more aware of imperiled species. “I’ve been trying to focus more on local animals and endangered animals, but still keep it fun, so that people can see them and remember them,” she said.

Cassandra Kim working on her portrait of the Richmond Falcon Cam peregrine falcons.

In 2024, Kim’s painting of a spotted skunk won the Artistic Expression category of the DWR Restore the Wild Artwork Competition, and in 2025 both she and her two daughters entered the competition, which featured an Atlantic sturgeon, and were displayed in the Restore the Wild Artwork Exhibition in March.

“Because of the youth categories, I told the girls, ‘We can do this show together!’ We were just tickled,” she said. “We had so much fun, looking at the species of fish and understanding it. They liked finding different fish that belong in the James. So it was such a fun thing that we all got to do it together.”

Cassandra Kim (center) with her daughters at the 2025 Restore the Wild Artwork Competition Exhibit.

Her family lives in Richmond, and Kim spends a lot of time outside with them. “We go to a lot of parks, and we write down all the animals and plants we see,” she said. “We just really love exploring. I’ve played with making my own pigment, so we’ve been collecting things that we can make that with, too.”

Kim does quite a bit of research on each species of animal she paints, to make sure anatomical details are correct, to include applicable habitat details, and to choose the right outfit and pose for their portrait. “I just want to make a character out of them and see in what era they belong, what clothes they would wear,” Kim explained. “Questions I ask myself are things like, ‘If a snake is going to wear an outfit, are they going to be insecure that they don’t have shoulders? Would they add shoulder pads?’ I think animals have different quirks, and I feel like they would have different insecurities, so I wonder how those would come out in their clothes. Would a winged animal wear a jacket? Would there be slits so the wings can come out?

“I want it to be logical nonsense. It’s nonsensical that they wear these outfits, but the outfits should make sense for that species,” Kim continued.