A Parallel Planets piece by Unknown
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| From a project inspired by Mary Anning |
Parallel Planets presents December Daze
Jessica Bartram and Azure Horizons
Story & Interview by Nicole Lane
Mentioned: artistic households, giant squids, and Frida Kahlo's clothes
There’s lots of weird and scary shit in the sea. Take for instance, the Giant Spider Crab, which can measure up to 12 feet, or the Pacific Viperfish, who has teeth so over-sized that it cannot even close its mouth. Beneath our little feet and out past where our eyes cannot see is a mix of cerulean and seaweed, Poseidon’s realm, and the briny taste of the swell and the crest.
I’m intuitively drawn to the water. The notion of the unknown is sirenic, always enticing and inviting. What goes on beyond the layer of crust and muck that our feet tread, shuffle, and wallop on every day? Which inhabitants have we yet to find?
While scrolling through Tumblr, as I most often do, I came into contact with the illustrative artist Jessica Bartram. Her spirited work is composed of empyrean icons; make-believe and childhood exuberance tangle the viewer in a labyrinth of what is real and what is imaginary. Specifically, Jessica's underwater seascapes caught my eye while I sat in awe of her nature-inspired projects. Her ever-expanding oeuvre blends time, fantasy, and curiosity.
Images from a new book project
Give us a brief introduction to yourself.
My name is Jessica Bromley Bartram and I'm currently just finishing the first semester of my final year at OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) in Toronto. I'm officially studying (and doing my year-long-thesis project in) graphic design, but have completed most of a minor in illustration (unofficially) as well. I grew up with artists for parents and have always practiced some sort of art, though considering it as a career didn't happen until about five years ago.
How and when did you begin illustrating, painting, and creating overall?
As noted above, I grew up in an artistic household, so art has always been a part of my life. There are photos of me painting alongside my dad in his studio as a toddler, and I even collaborated on a series of etchings with my mom when I was about five (I still find those pieces amazing, even as an adult)! I kept up some sort of artistic practice all through elementary and high school, then switched mostly to writing during my first degree (a English major / History minor), as I thought I wanted to be a journalist. That career path didn't pan out, though, and I got back into painting in the fall of 2007, as I was trapped on the couch with a broken ankle and tired of both reading and watching TV. Since then, I've kept working away, first in my own time while working 9-5, then at OCAD when I left that job to go and learn how to be a graphic designer. As soon as I began my first conceptual illustration class in second year, I realized both how much I still needed to learn and how interested I was in pursuing it as part of my career.
By utilizing watercolors and gouache in your work, your hues are luminous and radiant, however the opaqueness and concrete lines create a finality to your illustrative work. Can you discuss the decision in choosing your materials and medium?
I latched onto watercolours by happenstance, as they were the only paints I happened to have in the apartment when I was dealing with my broken ankle. Despite the fact I'd always been intimidated by them as a medium since they're so unforgiving, I forged ahead out of desperation and was surprised to find that they weren't anywhere near as cruel as I'd thought. Over the years I've moved from solid pan watercolour to Windsor & Newton brand tube colour, as I find that vibrancy and relative opaqueness easier to achieve with liquid colour (and W&N's pigments are generally gorgeous and reliable). I added gouache to my practice in third year during a class with Jean-Christian Knaff - after the first few projects, he suggested I might improve the legibility and contrast of my work by coming in with opaque gouache after the watercolour work was done. I tried it out on this piece and haven't looked back since!
Is the creative community in Toronto supportive and engaging? Can you expand on what it’s like to live where you do?
I've had wonderful experiences with the Toronto creative community, both through OCAD and the non-school world. In 2011, before I started at school, I helped found a studio/gallery/art hub/all-round-creative-space called Graven Feather, which I'm happy to say continues to thrive on Queen Street West (one of our many creative districts). Though I had to leave because of the intensity of OCAD's coursework, my time there introduced me to many facets of the Toronto printmaking and general art community, and my time at GF still helps me make connections with other creative folk (and it's always nice to know an awesome gallery to direct my fellow art-making friends towards when they're looking for a place to have a show). I've met a multitude of incredible people during my time at OCAD, both fellow students and professors, and feel like my time there has allowed me to build a creative network that will continue to provide me with inspiration and mutual support even after I graduate.
Many of your pieces are accompanied by text or written material such as a book, story or brief write up. Do writers contact you to collaborate or are the words in the text also a collaboration on your part as well?
I am currently creating illustrations in collaboration with a writer (my first official collaborative book illustration project!), but all my other work is accompanied by writing I've created myself. As I mentioned a few questions back, I majored in English during my first degree, and, much like I've always created art, I feel like I've always loved writing. When I started painting again in 2007, I mostly created anthropomorphized animals in dapper clothing, and each creature came with a brief story detailing their name, profession, and a few neat facts about their lives. I stepped the art + storytelling up another notch with my Collected Collection project, which saw my illustrations accompanied by an 80 page book containing the story of my made-up Victorian explorer/amateur naturalist. Since then, I've completed two short illustrated novellas (Frostbitten and Once Deer) based on pieces of fiction I've written in the past couple years, and am working on my third book right now. I've also got a few stories in development, so I hope to eventually mash them all together into a collection of short works! I'm currently just self publishing these stories, but as soon as school's done I plan to get my act together and look into finding an actual publisher.
Pencil drawn skeletons in the project, "Marine Skeleton Pattern"
Oh goodness, probably! I spent my childhood reading all kinds of historical fiction and watching nature shows, so it makes sense that I'd start to make up historical amateur naturalists as an adult. I was also lucky enough to travel to Europe a few times with my parents when I was younger, which both brought the history of that part of the world to life (as my dad was an art history teacher before he taught printmaking and enthusiastically passed on his knowledge while we traveled) and instilled in me a love of rambling adventures. I spent the bulk of my late elementary school/early high school time thinking I wanted to work as a scientist, as I loved animals and the natural world in general, but realized in grade eleven that the way science is taught doesn't work for my brain. Despite this, I continued to love reading about scientific discoveries, particularly in biology and palaeontology, so that has stayed on as a huge source of inspiration.
Digging through your Tumblr, I even found some evidence of gifs! Is this something that you hope to continue to explore? I feel like an installation with life-sized characters that move, glow and sparkle would incredibly interesting! Do you ever think about taking your pieces off of the paper? Do you see anything new in your future of your illustrative work in general?
That sounds like a beautiful installation - I'll have to file that away for future consideration! I just learned to make gifs, as I took a video game design class last year and was responsible for making some of the sprites (a.k.a. anything that is not a background). It's an interesting way to explore my love of stop motion animation in a slightly less involved way, as gifs are basically little stop motion snippets. I do love taking my ideas off the paper, and have always dabbled in 3D things, mostly sewn creatures and puppets. I've done three little stop motion shorts for school - Hic Sunt Dracones (which was a group project), Process, and Phases of the Moon. For the last two I created all the sets and characters, did all the animation - basically did everything but the music, and found interacting with my work as three-dimensional objects, then again in the 2D digital editing space to be an interesting experience (and one I'd like to experiment with some more). In terms of new directions, there will definitely be more stop motion, and I've been considering working on a show based on these two embroidered moths I created over the summer (seen here & here), as I do love working on embroidered creatures. In terms of two-dimensional work, I want to continue to push myself when it comes to the content and style of imagery for both my own books and anything else I have the good fortune to work on - I purposely drew things I don't normally draw (eg. a messy desk, boats, a sunset landscape) and used colours I don't generally use (purple, mostly) for Sargasso (my next book) and have been thrilled with how well everything is going (despite the fact I spend the first few hours of each painting vaguely terrified!).
If you could be any animal, what would you be?
Oh man, this is a tough one. In terms of creatures whose lives I know are awesome, I'd choose my dog, as she's basically the queen of our house and has everything she could ever want (snuggles, food, treats, dog park gallops, soft places on which to mope, as she's a dramatic beagle-beast, etc.). If I had to pick a wild animal, I'd probably go for raccoon, as they're smart and weird and have tiny perfect hands, or pangolin, as I've loved their strangeness ever since I met one on a behind the scenes tour of the Toronto Zoo when I was seven. Finally, if I'm allowed to choose an animal that's both extinct and mostly made up, I'd like to be a Jurassic Park-style velociraptor, as they're clever girls.
The combination of embroidery and painting, as seen in Mary Anning and the Sea, is gentle and well-crafted. When did you first decide to combine both embroidery floss and paint?
My very first foray into combining floss and paint was this piece from first year, where we were asked to choose someone famous, find an article about them, and create an illustration/magazine-style layout for that article. I selected an article about finding a wardrobe full of Frida Kahlo's clothes that hadn't been opened since her death and, when opened, still smelled like her. Since many of her dresses were embellished with traditional embroidery, I came up with the idea of adding some actual thread to the painting to make the images more lush and add texture. I used floss in a similar way in this piece the next year, once again to make the piece more tactile, but definitely found my stride while working on the Mary Anning piece. The use of embroidery there was much more conceptually rooted than the first two pieces, as I wanted to suggest Anning's rejection of traditional Victorian womanhood (she chose to work as a palaeontologist instead and made a living from selling the fossils she unearthed, though many of her discoveries were, at the time, co-opted by the rich men who purchased them. I could go on for a while about her!) via the embroidered skeletons on her skirts.
Do you have any upcoming news for 2015 that you would like to share with us?
For anyone who lives in Toronto, I'll be a part of OCAD's (100th!) grad show in May 2015, showing off my final thesis project, which will be an exhibit about a weird parallel universe in which bio-technology has become more prominent than binary tech and Corporate Dystopia reigns (follow my thesis blog for more information in the upcoming months...at the moment it's mostly a collection of inspiring materias). From what I can tell, it's going to be a pretty amazing show overall up on the Graphic Design floor! I'm also selling a bunch of my books via my website and will be launching my third book sometime in the new year, so that's news too!
More from Jessica Bartram: Website, Process Blog, Thesis Blog
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| Image from a new book project |
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| A curiosity cabinet for the project, "A Collected Collection: The Discoveries of R.W. Brackley, Adventurer Extraordinaire" |
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