12 Ethereal Photographs To Spark Your Imagination (NSFW)

"Color is, more often than not, my greatest muse," New York-based artist Shae Detar says of her wildly evocative and fiercely bold photograph-painting hybrids. "I often aim to take myself away from the reality of the actual photograph and into something more otherworldly."

Detar, who went from casually snapping images of her friends nude to creating billboards for companies like Aritzia, places NY women into a supernatural utopia, leaving her audience wondering where on earth the photo was taken and how in the world she was able to get such an emotionally alluring picture.

It's not just the creativity and hustle of the city that keeps Detar on her toes, consistently pushing her work to new, even more outlandish boundaries. "I'm mostly inspired by paintings from the 1800s and early 1900s," she explains. "Artists like Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Jean-Édouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Klimt, Picasso, and Matisse. Their work really moves me and gets me excited to try my own hand at making something with the imagination. I love what Van Gogh once said: 'I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.'"

Longing to escape New York City, even if it's just for a moment? Enter Detar's fantastical dream world, where the boldest colors are embraced, landscapes create the most captivating of backgrounds, and the body (in all its various shapes and sizes) is celebrated in its most natural form.