Sunday 9 June 2019

Sinister,

was the word that sprang to mind,


 as I viewed these images,

 by Utah-based illustrator Jenna Barton

 she creates shadowy portraits of animals inspired by her dreams, travels, experiences, and the aesthetic and emotions of the rural environments where she grew up. While she does integrate watercolor into some of her illustrations, Barton’s work is primarily digital,

 the style she refers to as “magical-realism-animal-gothic” came about around 2017, after she completed her BFA in Illustration and decided to take some time to escape the constraints of school and to focus on art that she cared about, 'I hark back a lot to my childhood in Idaho, as well as looking to my current environment in Utah, to inform my work. I’d like to capture the strange emotions that I always felt in rural and empty places, and the daydreams I’ve had there. It’s those luminal spaces that I like best, and I’m interested in the structures that bring the human world into nature—radio towers, houses, power lines—especially in the absence of humans themselves',

Barton’s otherworldly works are available as prints via her webstore, they certainly work as for some reason I find them slightly unsettling, so I am not sure if I really would like one of them staring down at me from the wall.


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