Joanna Blémont’s paintings feel like those quiet movie scenes where you’re made to dwell a little longer on a shot in anticipation of what’s about to happen next. The apprehension felt in these artworks leaves you with the impression that there is something being hidden that’s on the edge of being felt or seen.
Although familiar, these intricate and eerie illustrated moments aren’t of any particular place, and this is intentional. “I tend to draw spaces which can feel familiar to a wider group of people, I approach this by removing place-specific markers,” Joanna says. Instead of translating a particular landscape or space into a watercolour work, the artist’s creative process consists of going on walks to take reference photographs of a range of different environments and using Google Maps to explore locations near and far to take snippets from for inspiration – a hangover from illustrating in lockdown during the pandemic. Joanna is drawn to the “unreality” brought about by this inconclusive mix of spaces and forms: “I think the architecture in some pieces will always give away the vague location. The figures in my work are often silhouettes or shadows, they’re symbolic of a presence more than a person.”
Painting in sequences, Joanna explores one scene through multiple lenses. Sometimes these sequences start as watercolour or pencil marks and then turn into Risograph prints, comics or publications – like her latest zine Comatose, an artist book that set out to explore the theme of “the transition between wakefulness and sleep”, Joanna says. More recently the artist produced an animated sequence of over 2,000 watercolour frames with a whole team of painters for fashion house Loewe’s 180 year anniversary campaign, and the result is something out of this world. Although labour intensive, what Joanna enjoys most is “the slow pace required to work with these mediums”, she ends. “I feel I make better work this way.”