Amélie Barnathan is developing an extremely distinctive career in illustration. It is a career based on an obsessive love of drawing; she wakes from dreams and lets the subconscious unfold in the intricacy of pencil drawings at her London studio. These coloured pieces appear like vivid experiences, sometimes autobiographical, while other times interpretive of classical stories and images, reimagined through her powerful imagining.
Many of her illustrations are scroll-format drawings that measure up to five metres long. Some might describe them as scenes of schoolgirls and the mishaps they get into – ‘mishaps’ being the keyword, as her work, at first glance, with the bright colours and school girl characters feels harmless and fun. However, there are also dark and violent themes present, which speak of the injustice and struggle of women today and throughout history.
Where does the inspiration for your drawings come from?
My drawings share a certain affinity with surrealism. I like to think the images I use are extracted from the collective subconscious. I am very interested in the works of Freud and Jung, I think it feeds into my work; digging into the subconscious to create new works. It happens quite often that I dream about a new scene for a new drawing and want to use it, but I also filter a lot of them as they don’t always make sense!
They are continuous throughout my work. There are the same themes happening in my dreams over and over and I always wonder which part informs which – I think they feed into each other for sure, but there’s no way of knowing, it’s a ‘chicken or the egg’ situation.
You seem to use the same palette of colour in your work – is colour important to you?
I think there is a specific palette I unconsciously work with all the time: vivid colours in opposition with dark subject matters. I use colours that are “softer” and associated with girlhood like pink, purple and red. I use them in opposition with darker, sometimes violent subject matter, in order to provoke paradoxical emotions for the viewer. I enjoy creating an enigmatic picture that cannot be grasped with only one single glance but, rather, need multiple readings.
I noticed many of your artwork involved school girls, is that something you identify with? Or is it a metaphor?
The characters of my drawings are mainly girls in the phase between childhood and adulthood which I find is the most founding time, as we come across the first questions and interrogations of our sense of self, sexuality and identity. In my drawings the school uniform is more used as a metaphor; it represents authority and constraint with the pressure to conform in social spaces and societal ideas imposed on women that forcibly creates an ideal of femininity. I wanted to investigate the nuances of the female collective and the pressures of conforming in social environments.
Your work has a powerful message – is that something you always try to have at the forefront of your work?
I feel it is the role of an artist to convey messages and enrich people’s perspectives with the scenarios I create of my experience as a woman. I try to approach subject matters that I feel strongly about, whether it’s violence towards women, the complexity of female identity or contemporary anxieties linked to the representation of gender.
I want to keep pushing my socially engaged stance as an artist and particularly as a woman; expressing those tensions is something that is making more sense to me as I grow older and my work evolves with me. I also started to be comfortable with the fact that a lot of my drawings are actually completely autobiographical and I shouldn’t hide from that.
Can you talk about the representation of women in your work?
A lot of the women in my work are naked. Originally, I think it comes from my passion for art history, which has seen the female nude as one of the most depicted subjects ever. Women are represented in many ways: as the fallen woman, a temptress, as lustful nymphs, or virginal, angelic and pure. I want to re-invent those images, from the perspective of a woman, and change the iconographies of violence, specifically rape, that reinforces the power that men hold over women. As it has always been seen, in art history, as heroic.
The swan, in my work, refers to the Greek Myth of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus transforms himself into a swan to violate Leda. The horse refers to the myth of the Sabine women in which men come to abduct and rape the Sabine riding powerful horses. Both mythological subjects have been represented by many painters over a thousand times, but rarely from a woman’s perspective.
At the end of my master at Royal College of Art (RCA), I completed my dissertation on the witches of the Middle Ages. I became interested in these ideas that society has held of ‘monstrous’ females. As this research progressed I began to identify with these women of the past and determined them to be contemporary archetypes.
What is your creative process?
I paint with watercolour to fill in shapes and then work on top of that with various pens and pencils. The work process depends strongly on the nature of the visual, whether it’s a commercial illustration brief or a self-initiated drawing. In both, I like to gather a lot of visual materials before, whether it’s some of my sketches or inspirational pictures from the internet. I think about what message I want to convey by mashing this material together – I never know what it’s gonna look like.
I identified very early on that I feel the medium of drawing is the perfect tool of expression and analysis for myself. The actual process of drawing can also be seen as ‘mental unravelling’ and I think this is an important aspect when dealing with visceral, fantastical and sometimes challenging imagery. I personally rarely work in digital. I enjoy the process of working with materials way too much, the colours, smells and textures.
What does being an artist mean to you?
My Italian grandmother was an etcher, and that definitely played a huge part in my leaning towards the arts. Some of my earliest memories are learning to draw with her in her studio by the seaside in Italy, while she was showing me how to prepare engravings and plates.
I think I do drawings mainly to tell stories and escape boundaries, and I like to share my personal vision of the world in order to create a portal of escapism. I feel creating works of art produces this effect for me. I get excited when I hear people telling me my work provoked something in them, whether it’s dark or joyful, and they get to enrich their own realities.
