Two years after Fairy Tale Remnants, a new collection of visual absurdity and prose
R.Crumb: “Very fine work throughout. I think [she’s] stronger than ever. It’s uplifting to look at [her] fine pictures.”
Jessica McCort - Los Angeles Review of Books - “At one level, Tierce’s book feels like a bit of a trick. From the full title on the inside cover (Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden: Life is full of pricks) to the creepy, disorienting, but nonetheless humorous artwork adorning the pages, the book clearly means to upend our understanding of the purposes of — and audience for — a “children’s” book.”
The Comics Review U.K.- Best of Year 2021- “The marriage of image and text…can simultaneously tickle like a feather, cut like a scalpel andhit like a steam-hammer.”
Dave Cooper, artist, cartoonist, animator, author: “Tierce's paintings are wonderful. Bizarre and genuine and unsettling. Some reminded me of the great George Grosz. I loved [her] prose. I was left wanting more.”
John Cuneo, illustrator, writer: “I really like the rawness in these images. It feels like [she] actually resisted “polishing" things up, both paint and imagery-wise. It feels closer to the Id: direct, unvarnished and unsettling. It’s personal, and tortured and disturbing - I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.”
This collection of strange, surreal, luridly rendered illustrations accompanied by short prose guides the viewer into a deeper level of experiencing the visual escapism of the imagery. The words are a way into these pictorial fables that take the contradictions of contemporary life, dress it in storybook garb, and serve it as a vision one might have in a fever dream or an acid trip.
The wild and luridly rendered "Pulling Weeds From a Cactus Garden" reflects the dark side of human interaction and alienation. Just like the act of pulling weeds from a cactus garden, it's tricky, and you can't do it without getting hurt. Yet, these tales of hazard deliver beauty and humor from otherwise dark situations. The result is visual allegories more nourishing than the circus of life around us.
Woven into these tales is a revisitation of several Aesop Fables, stories that provide insight into surviving in a world where the cards are stacked against you. Like Aesop's Fables, these stories use symbolism not only to illustrate but define vices.
Themes of alienation, struggle between our inner worlds, expectations of reality are the center of these thorny tales. Characters in the book represent threats in a dystopian world. They are symbolic tropes in confrontation with themselves or those around them.
This is a wonderful review of my book "Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden -Life is full of pricks" by Jeffrey D. Keeten, reviewer and talented writer. Recently, he's contributed to a collection of scary, suspenseful, and weird short stories, prose, and poems along with a group of other writers titled Halloween Party '21, (available on Amazon).
I am flattered and inspired by his insight and the parallels he draws to other artists.
When Nathalie Tierce first approached me about reading her book, I thought to myself, I’m not an art critic, nor an expert on poetic prose, and haven’t read a kid’s book (This is not a kid’s book, so my reservations in that regard were completely erroneous) in many decades. My mind was swimming with all the reasons why I was the wrong reviewer for her book. Instead of sending her my standard thanks for thinking of me but… email response, I decided to go visit her website. I’d share that address right now, but I don’t want to lose you quite yet from my review because I know, like me, you will be spending a good hour flipping through her gallery, and you would be so bedazzled by the raw power of her paintings that you would forget all about my attempts to explain why I like Nathalie’s paintings so much.
Check out this little gem from R. Crumb about Tierce’s work: ”You are a genuine visionary artist with a direct line to your subconscious.” And what a marvelous subconscious it is!
I first discovered R. Crumb when I bought the R. Crumb illustrated edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang. This prompted me to search for more examples of his art, and I was soon ogling his Amazonian women and sometimes gasping with pleasure at his flagrantly deviant, but honest, art. (I once called a rather impressive looking waitress working in an Oklahoma bar in Bricktown R. Crumbesque. It was truly as if she’d stepped straight out of the lurid mind of Crumb.) I could see how Crumb, after perusing Nathalie’s art, recognized a fellow artist who is genuinely expressing her truest feelings through her art.
This book was inspired by Aesop’s Fables, but I couldn’t help thinking about the Brothers Grimm, especially before the brothers sanitized their folk tales for children. Even after being censored, those tales have gruesome and grotesque moments that continue to give children and adults nightmares and daylight shudders. I found Tierce’s work to be deliciously horrid and, at moments, wonderfully torrid.
Tierce worked on these paintings for two years, and during that time, as she said in her forward, “the world witnessed the most bizarre spectacle of politics.” She went on to say: ”Being in lock-down for Covid-19 made people examine disturbing, deeper currents running through our society in the U.S. that we were otherwise too distracted to scrutinize.”
We are living in a post-truth world, and I miss the world that existed before. It wasn’t perfect, but at least we could disagree about things and still be friends. Now, we are bludgeoned with information, some of it true, some of it completely false, and most of it is somewhere in the middle. We have been segmented into two Americas. Each of those segments believes the other half to be batshit crazy.
Tierce further stated in the introduction, ”The symbolism that developed in those works came from the turbulence, fear, and confusion we were experiencing and trying to wade our way through.”
Art provides us with a chance for self-reflection, and as you peruse Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden, you will find, as I did, that what I need in my life is more flights of fancy. The paintings in this book are playful and humorous, but also speckled with thorny truths. They are the ticklish parts of our imagination and what is accepted as reality brought together in a pleasing mixture to evoke realizations that remind the gazer of the things we used to be afraid of, the things we should be afraid of, and also the things we should still try to cherish.
“‘The drool on your chin tells me you're not listening.’ --- The Lamb and the Wolf Aesop’s Fables.” For me, this sentence sums up the last few years. We quit listening to each other. We quit caring about one another. The wolves have been turned loose in all of us, and we are a less kind society. Lambs, optimists, proffered kindness are all seen as naive. Toothy ruthlessness has run rampant. It isn’t about who let the dogs loose, but who let loose the werewolves?
Tierce’s paintings are visually amazing, and the longer you peer into them, the more you will see, so you will enjoy these paintings on a multitude of levels. I even turned each painting upside down and saw even more. That is a trick I learned from my professor in college while taking a survey class on art.
I see some Picasso in her horses, some Stephen King in her clown, a bit of Cortés in her skeleton, Jeff Goldblum in her southern belle, a smidge of Ralph Steadman lurking around the edges of many of her paintings, but in the end, these are what will be known as vintage Nathalie Tierce art.
You will look at these pictures and see your own marvelous things.
If you need a chuckle and a shudder in equal measure, then this book will give you exactly what you are looking for. This book is preceded by a book called Fairy Tale Remnants that looks fabulous as well. I will also be reviewing that book in the very near future. For that slightly quirky person in your life who is almost impossible to buy for, these books will make a perfect Christmas/birthday gift.
Nathalie Tierce provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
As promised here is the link to Nathalie Tierce’s website: https://nathalietierce.com/
You can also follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathalietie...
And like her page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathalie.tierce
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