Brassworks Gallery Novemeber 11 Through December 12 - Villains and Heroes
New mixed media work by Nathalie Tierce for her solo show Villains and Heroes at Brassworks Gallery
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Villains and Heroes Solo Show at Brassworks Gallery November 11, 2023
I am excited about my solo show, Villains and Heroes, at Brassworks Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The collection of works focuses on telling the story of individuals pushed by their desires and circumstances.
Some of the imagery in my paintings include a world-weary Alice in Wonderland working as a waitress while she's nine months pregnant. Mr. Potato Head, now an exhausted office worker, tries to find solace in drinking beer at a bar while a lively blue pony talks nonstop into his plastic ear. Legos, usually used by kids to build a positive world of schools and heroes, instead portrays a dystopian society where marginalized people struggle to survive.
I'll be at a book signing event for my new book, Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe. I'd love to see you there. If you're not in Portland on November 11th, you can also check out the online exhibition at www.brassworksgallery.com.
Chronicles of Despair Review in Comics Review U.K.
This very Flattering review of my book, Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe, from Comics Review U.K. also gave it a 9/10.
By Nathalie Tierce (Indigo Raven)
ISBN: 978-1-7341874-5-8 (PB)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Cruel Truths for Crazy Days… 9/10
Allying words to pictures is an ancient, potent and – when done right – irresistibly evocative communications tool: one that can simultaneously tickle like a feather, cut like a scalpel, and hit like a steam hammer. As such, repeated visits to a particular piece of work will even generate different responses depending on the recipient’s mood. If you’re a multi-disciplined, multi-media artist like Nathalie Tierce, fresh challenges must be a hard thing to find, but rewards for successfully breaking new ground are worth the effort… and the viewer’s full attention.
Tierce is a valued and veteran creator across a spectrum of media, triumphing in film and stage production for everyone from the BBC to Disney and Tim Burton to Martin Scorsese. She has crafted music performance designs for Andrew Lloyd Webber and The Rolling Stones, all the while generating a wealth of gallery art, painted commissions and, latterly, graphic narratives such as Fairy Tale Remnants and Pulling Weeds From a Cactus Garden.
Perpetually busy, she still finds time to stop and stare; thankfully, human-watching is frequently its own reward, sparking tomes like this slim, enthrallingly revelatory package forensically dissecting human nature in terms of cultural landmarks as scourged by the inescapable mountain of terrors large, small, general and intensely personal.
On show in this portable night gallery are stunning paintings in a range of media, rendered in many styles and manners whilst channeling the artist’s own fear-mongering childhood entertainer influences. These include Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, Heinrich Hoffman (Der Struwwelpeter), and other dark fairy tales, as well as compellingly mature comic creators such as Aline Kominsky Crumb & R. Crumb, Will Eisner and Claire Bretecher.
The artworks explore shades of anxiety, alienation, frustration, longing, disappointment, despondency, hopelessness, instant gratification, loss of confidence, purposelessness, racism, toxic masculinity, neurosis, death, and loneliness by suborning cultural touchstones like Popeye, Donald Duck and other Disney icons, mass-media mavens like Bowie and King Kong, beloved childhood toys and even modern lifestyle guru Homer Simpson.
Bracketed by revelatory insights and sharing context in Introduction and Biography, the pictorial allegories When Shock and Horror Collide, Forest Nymph, Capitolina and the Dubious Superhero, The Genie and the Swimmer, Bad Fishing Trip, Slapstick Brawl, Undateable, Crazy Rooster Man, Strange Leader, My Favorite Aliens, The Queen of Hearts Goes Shopping, Acrobat, Fear of Death, Running, What Killed the Dodo? The Bore, 3am, Pussy Cat, Barfly, Alice in Waitingland (my absolute personal favourite!), Beginning and End, Rascal Dog, Spiraling, Lonely Soldier, Homer Gone Bad, Jittery and utterly appalling endpiece Bathtime, connecting forensic social observation with everyday paranoias we all experience. The result is a mad melange of bêtes noire and unsettled icons du jour, with each condemnatory visual judgment deftly wedded to frankly terrifying texts encapsulating contemporary crisis points, delivered as edgy epigrams and barbed odes.
Chronicles of Fear – Tales of Woe is a mordantly mature message of mirth-masked ministrations exposing the dark underbellies we’re all desperately sucking in and praying no one notices.
A perfect dalliance for thinking bipeds at the end of civilization, aimed at victims of human nature with a sharp eye and unforgiving temperament – and surely, isn’t that all of us?
© 2023 Indigo Raven. © 2023 Nathalie Tierce. All rights reserved. - Comics Review U.K.
The Bore - Nathalie Tierce ©2023
Falling in Love with the Unlovable
When painting certain characters for my next book Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe, I based it on the idea that their profile had popped up on a dating app. It coincided with the thought that one of people's biggest fears is being unloved. Not being loved overlaps with the need to be seen, valued, and of course, having someone else to love back.
In observing my friends that are dating, in particular, when they use dating apps, they are, in fact, shopping. They are hunting on eharmony, Match, or Tinder for that magic salve with all the ingredients to relieve that itch. There isn't anything wrong with wanting certain qualities in a mate. Looking for traits that make someone attractive is reasonable.
The part misaligned with the quest is, how do you summarize a soul in a selfie and tagline? If dating apps are giant digital shopping malls, it's like the product is designing its own marketing strategy. When it comes to personal identity, isn't that an abstract concept? Isn't our experience of another person more important than who they say they are? Packaging something as complex as an individual, is it being presented to appeal to the broadest audience or the select few who will "get it"?
The portraits for my book, Chronicles of Fear, start with a core of some awkward, disastrous, or otherwise difficult characteristic. When I say portrait, I'm talking about illustrations. The writing comes after. To further complicate the procedure, I don't start with sketches or drawings when inventing these dramatis personae. I begin by making random marks and splashes on a page and search for them. It starts by seeing the curve of a lip, the slant of an eyebrow, and then I cobble the rest together.
It is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without having a reference to the finished image. I'm hanging on to the idea that I've seen someone in the amorphous pool of brushstrokes with the beginnings of what I'm looking for, and I have to paint them out of chaos into a recognizable being.
These searches are a quest for an undesirable type, a nervous wreck, an overconfident bore. After the long haul of "finding" them, I'm always left with affection for them. While painting the annoying trope, empathy and humor creep in and transform my feelings about the character into ones I care about.
Human beings can be difficult to love. We're all complicated. It seems like relationships are designed to fail. And, of course, falling in love with a painting is less complex than falling in love with a person. Maybe the way we surf the internet, being distracted and attracted by all that twinkles, makes it more challenging to sit with someone and figure out what makes them beautiful.
Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden -Life is Full of Pricks (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2021) and Fairy Tale Remnants (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2019) Are available on Amazon in paperback and ebook.
Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe will be released in Fall 2023 in paperback and ebook on Amazon and select retail outlets.
My solo show, Villains and Heroes, will be opening at Brassworks Gallery in Portland, Oregon, on November 12, 2023
Chronicling Fear
My paintings and mixed media pieces are images pulled from emotions, ideas, and desires. In the current book I'm working on, Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe, I've created 27 illustrations and paired each with short prose. It continues the ideas of my other books, Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden - Life is Full of Pricks and Fairy Tale Remnants.
The original title of Chronicles of Fear was Chronicles of Desire. I felt the pull of "want" dragging my characters into extreme states of being. As the project progressed, I saw the absurdity, tragedy, and comedy of this cyclone of terror coming from each character's inner world. I realized fear was the force behind these powerful states of existential crisis.
Fear is a curious beast. If we conquer it, we can reach our dreams on the other side. If we let it swallow us, there's no limit to its depth.
I hope that defining these vices through a hyper-colored lens makes these horrors more digestible, even humorous.
Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden - Life is Full of Pricks (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2021) and Fairy Tale Remnants (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2019) Are available on Amazon in paperback and ebook.
Chronicles of Fear will be released in Fall 2023 in paperback and ebook on Amazon and select retail outlets.
If you're interested in my thoughts and work with visual escapism, please subscribe for news about my upcoming publications, exhibits, and projects.
Praise from an Icon
This quarter’s Mineshaft has come out with the amazing work of R.Crumb, Drew Friedman, Aline and Sophie Crumb, Max Clotfelter, Robert Armstrong, Chris Mueller, Noah Van Sciver, Glenn Head, Fabio Vermelho and many more!
I was beyond ecstatic to have my name mentioned in the Letters section by one of my favorite artists, R.Crumb, praising my work in the previous issue.
For those of you not familiar with Robert Crumb, Robert Dennis Crumb, born August 30, 1943 is an American cartoonist and musician. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
Crumb is a prolific artist and contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, Zap Comix, contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the East Village Other and many other publications, including a variety of one-off and anthology comics. During this time, inspired by psychedelics and cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, he introduced a wide variety of characters that became extremely popular, including countercultural icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his Keep On Truckin' strip. Sexual themes abounded in all these projects, often shading into scatological and pornographic comics. In the mid-1970s, he contributed to the Arcade anthology; following the decline of the underground, he moved towards biographical and autobiographical subjects while refining his drawing style, a heavily crosshatched pen-and-ink style inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century cartooning. Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo (1981–1993), which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. As his career progressed, his comic work became more autobiographical.
In his letter to the editor, R. Crumb wrote, “Glad to see the work by Nathalie Tierce show up in there. She’s a strong artist and seems to be on the right track, getting even more interesting as time goes on. Too bad you can’t print her work in color. It would really pop out if you printed it in the original colors.”
Upcycled Dancer moves to Forever Home in Colorado
Sometimes the painting process goes haywire, taking with it expensive art supplies. Not one to throw out materials, I prefer to recycle them into new pieces. Case in point, the collage piece, Dancer.
Dancer started as a large watercolor with big ambitions of being lively and vibrant; however, this concept soon descended into a complicated and haphazard blur of tones and textured hues on a beautiful piece of Arches 140 lb. paper.
What to do? I tore and cut into the bedraggled painting, making small shapes that individually have their own charm.
What I'm left with is a big, heaping pile of possibilities.
I put these shapes onto a page, moving them around until they began to 'talk' to each other. Swiftly gluing them in place and producing a batch before I stopped, I put the collages aside for a couple of days.
When I return to them, I see them in a new way. I notice different things and accentuate them with with pen or paint. No one is more surprised than me with the resulting images. It’s almost like I’m chasing glimpses of them in the shadows, trying to cajole them out with line and color.
This is how Dancer came to life, salvaged from a recycled watercolor painting, and is now living with a collector in Colorado.
The Los Angeles Review of Books - Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden
Los Angeles Review of Books, Jessica McCort - Tierce participates in the Goreyesque tradition of destroying readers' expectations for the work they have picked up — in this case, the picture book.
Read MoreForest She Creature
Sharing my work with the world through social media is wonderful. However, sharing a static photo of a painting has its shortcomings.
One of the disadvantages of seeing an image in the digital world is the viewer can’t experience the physical magic of walking past the piece, stepping back, and getting close to the detail. So this report with a work of art is a unique engagement.
For this reason, I make short videos of my paintings, drawings, and mixed media pieces where movement becomes part of seeing the work.
Painting of my Forest She Creature
Fringe Group Show at Brassworks Gallery
I am thrilled to be a part of this fantastic group of artists at Brassworks Gallery. The opening is November 12. If you’re in the Portland area, please stop by.
Artist Talk at Gallery 825
Thank you everyone who came to my artist's talk at Gallery 825.
I'm pictured here with my painting Horses of The Apocalypse next to curator Cynthia Penna. The talk gives me an opportunity to speak about the hidden process of the work and hear the questions and insights of viewers which is always interesting for me.
Art Squat Interview
I’m very pleased to be featured in the latest issue of Art Squat Magazine. Johnny Otto asks me questions about my education, time spent working in films in Europe and a bunch of other art related topics.
Click the image or the link below for the full interview.
Solo Show presented by the Los Angeles Art Association at Gallery 825
It was a great opening Saturday! Sharing the work in the gallery was blast, thanks to everyone who came out.
My solo show, Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden - Life is full of pricks, explores how myth and fable intertwine with our lives and consciousness.
The exhibit runs from August 20th to September 16th. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 to 5 and is located at 825 North La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA
From the Gallery 825 website:
In Nathalie Tierce’s solo show Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden - Life is full of pricks, the artist uses metaphor to convey the brutality of human interaction in her mixed media paintings and drawings. Diving into the dark space between desire and fear, her characters struggle within uneasy cartoon humor. These figures become the symbols of the unnamable angst for the stories that bombard us through social media and politics.
Using visual allegory as a purge, Tierce holds up the effects of current events insidiously becoming a part of us. The texture and color of these works are gritty and intense—the icons in her imagery battle in a dreamlike arena. The boundaries of this stage are the edges of passion and aggression - murky with the runoff of culture and the human condition.
Tierce’s search for emotional truths in suffering led her to create a theater of the absurd from these complex situations in her quest to deliver its essence with poetry and irony. Her pieces and short writing have been published in a book by the same title as the show.
Spread Love
I’m super excited to have my piece “When Shock Collides into Despair” featured in this month’s edition of the Canadian publication Spread Love. Spread Love is a compilation of comics, arts and interviews.
You can order a copy here:
Solo Show at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood
I’m delighted to announce my solo show with The Los Angeles Art Association at Gallery 825.
In this collection, I use metaphor to convey the brutality of human interaction in my mixed media paintings and drawings. Diving into the dark space between desire and fear, characters struggle within uneasy cartoon humor.
These figures become the symbols of the unnamable angst for the stories that bombard us through social media and politics. Using visual allegory as a purge, I reflect on the effects of current events insidiously becoming a part of us.
The texture and color of these works are gritty and intense—icons battle in a dreamlike arena. The boundaries of this stage are the edges of passion and aggression - murky with the runoff of culture and the human condition.
My search for emotional truths in suffering led me to create this theater of the absurd in my quest to deliver its essence with poetry and irony and hopefully some humor.
What's Real in a Painting
I had just finished the painting. It wasn't even dry. A mother and her son, maybe five years old, happened to be walking past my garage studio while the door was open.
The boy rushed up the driveway and asked, "Did you do that? "I said, "yes." He then asked, "Which superhero is that?" I said, "not a very good one; I don't think he'll get off the ground with that pot belly." the little boy insisted, "all superheroes can fly. Even if Superman got fat, he would fly". I said, "Well, if you say so, I'm not convinced." He said, you should know that you painted this. But, I told him, I understand very little about what I'm painting, especially while I'm painting". He looked concerned and said again, "but you painted it." I said, that's true, but I don't do much of the deciding about what is in my painting; I'm just trying to figure out how to paint it. He looked at me with his head tilted, perplexed.
I said, '"you don't decide what you're going to dream, do you? It's something like that". Quickly, the kid turned away from me towards the painting and started running with his hands out. His mother called out, and I managed to stop him before his little outstretched paws hit the canvas surface. I realized he was going to settle this debate of what was real and what wasn't by touching the image.
Although I don't relish the idea of his little fingers sliding through the wet paint, there was something profoundly beautiful to me that this picture, this two-dimensional illusion, carried enough weight for this kid to want to "feel it" for himself.
It’s a pity how being a grown up stops us from “living” in a painting, song or poem. It’s the wonderful thing about being a kid.
Feature in Carpazine Magazine
I’m delighted to be featured in this current issue of Carpazine. They’ve done a a full color spread with images of my work and self accompanied by an interview.
Carpazine is a punk magazine that covers all aspects of underground culture. Available now @ www.carpazine.com
A Private View of Art
I paint to express emotions and thoughts I can't put into words. The only other experience that is as important to me is sharing the work with people.
While showing my paintings in galleries, museums, and social media connects to an audience, there is something exceptional about a private viewing.
Two collectors interested in acquiring my work arranged to view a selection of pieces in my home. One of the advantages is that I can curate the collection to their particular preferences. There is also a calm that comes with experiencing the group in a relaxed atmosphere of a living room.
Another bonus is my studio is adjacent to my home. There, I can talk about the process with pieces in various states of completion.
I am pleased to say that Destiny Guides Our Fortunes and Moon Monster will be a part of their collection.
It's much more than finding a forever home for the pieces. It's about opening the door to the how and why of the creative process.
Hearing the reactions, thoughts, and reflections of those witnessing the presentation fuels my imagination and inspires me to go back to the studio and paint.
Destiny Guides Our Fortunes
Moon Monster
