Over the years, artist Joanna Braithwaite has invited the viewer into her unique version of the animal kingdom: guinea pigs nervously awaiting their moment of glory on stage; dogs balancing on a tightrope; rats pulling at each other’s tails; flying fish; chickens caught mid-run in an egg-and-spoon race; and canaries in uniform, ready for war.

Braithwaite works against the grain of contemporary art. As a leading figurative painter, she brings to her work elements of caricature, however, there is also a deeply serious, intense level of craft.

Somehow those two aspects come together and you find you’re in a place that’s totally unique.

“My pictures are really very autobiographical,” Braithwaite says. “Animals are often the visual means I use to play out my response to the goings-on in the world around me and the things about day-to-day life that amuse or don’t sit quite right.”

Braithwaite shares her warehouse-style apartment on Parramatta Road, Sydney, with her partner, artist Neil Frazer.

The traffic roars past her upstairs studio, which is bathed in light and is “the perfect space to paint in”.

Her studio is tidy. There’s a painter’s table on wheels covered in paint, with a palette of oils about to be applied to the many canvases around the walls; a range of small, incomplete studies on one wall; and two larger paintings, one almost complete and the other in its early stages of development.

On another wall, an underpainting in yellow waits for Braithwaite to build up the layers of paint, which gives her paintings an almost romantic, transparent layering to them.

Behind her is a finished work – a fish on crutches, dreamily staring out to sea – ready for viewing.

A small room off the studio contains reference books, past works, scrapbooks full of notes and observations, newspaper cuttings, a CD player and a dog basket for Brains, the couple’s five-year-old pug.

“Having Brains here, there are elements of him within the paintings: how he holds his head; the twist of his collar; his reaction to something; the look he gets in his eyes,” Braithwaite says.

“Animals do look like people, and sometimes they look like people I know.”

An artist with a growing trans-Tasman profile, Braithwaite begins her paintings with small painted studies, which are often sold at her openings.

For her latest series, “Sea Legs”, she used real-life models – well-dead fish bought at the local market – to understand the shine and ripple of their scales and to document their form.

“I often photograph and draw animals I want to paint so I can view them in their habitat, and sometimes I like to observe the reactions of people looking on,” Braithwaite says.

“Zoos feel like very unnatural places to me. I visited Sydney Aquarium to do research for the fish series, and being under water like that, I wasn’t quite sure who was watching who.”

Though Braithwaite is interested in the work of a variety of painters, she has always had a passion for the old masters: “I like the energy and eclectic nature of a lot of contemporary work but I often return to my old favourites, like Goya and Manet, to look at technique, because I feel their works are so beautifully painted as well as having such powerful narrative.”

The essence of Braithwaite’s work is somewhat similar, however, it’s more upbeat and has an almost jovial point of view.

“My paintings have a humour that is evident, but there’s also a strong underlying curiosity regarding humans’ relationships with animals and our respect for them and the things we share,” she says.

Braithwaite’s work takes the viewer on a large leap. Sailing close to the sentimental Victorian genre paintings she studied while transporting fish to a human environment, she moves away from the predictable.

These are not obvious Victorian-inspired animal paintings but, rather, a mix of animal/human interactions that make the viewer sit up and take notice.

These transported creatures adapt to their new environment, despite the odds, and take on an almost human curiosity. The line between human and animal is continuously blurred, and Braithwaite enjoys the ride, too.

“Inspiration can come from anywhere,” Braithwaite says. The idea for her latest work, showing at the Brooke Gifford Gallery in Christchurch, was inspired by a holiday in Victoria, Australia, where the Great Ocean Road coastline has notoriously claimed an estimated 700 ships.

Braithwaite found further inspiration in an account of the wreck of Duncan Dunbar’s Hydrabad, which was carrying horses from Sydney to Calcutta.

The horses swam around, trying to make it to shore, while the boat sank. Eventually, sharks pulled the horses down to the seabed, their final resting place.

This desperate maritime disaster gives Braithwaite the perfect backdrop with which to infuse her style of melancholy and nostalgia while cleverly blurring the lines of human and animal interaction.

The wash-up sees animals scattered from a human disaster out into a world, where the brave and courageous not only survive but also need to evolve within their new-found environment.

The survivors of the wreckage stare out to sea wistfully, fish out of water adapting to their evolution to land and all things human.

“The world we live in is in a constant state of ecological and environmental change. Will animals be able to adapt and survive?” Braithwaite asks.

“The fish in the ‘Sea Legs’ paintings return to a form from which they may have evolved, inspired by discoveries of fossilised fish with the remains of limbs. My hope is they appear tentative but brave, emerging from the ocean and looking to the future.”

Braithwaite enjoys taking the viewer to this new place of evolution. Avoiding the sentimental or obvious, she compels us to adopt the viewpoint of the animal, in this case the fish that look longingly, almost dreamily, for another life.

Fortunately for us, Braithwaite brings her travelling menagerie to our world so that we, the viewers, can observe the animals’ viewpoint and enjoy the ride with them.