First, I want to wish you all a happy healthy peaceful new year! I’m writing those lines stuck in my bed with the flu, that’s the best way to start the year!
You may not have seen it but Guillermo Deltoro released his own version of Pinocchio in December. I’m not going to write a review about it but there’s something that I can say for sure: I cried. Not during the whole movie but at the very end. Spoiler alert: everyone is dying and Pinocchio is left alone.
To my own surprise, I burst into tears because of that, imagining the lonesome Pinocchio going through life without anyone. No one to love, no one to laugh with, no one to help, no one to talk to. No one to share memories with.
Sundays with Stella wrote a heartbreaking piece about her dear friend, slowly losing her memory because of dementia. Combined, these two stories made me realise that loneliness is something that I deeply want to explore in my work now. That is a feeling that never left me since I was a child, spending hours alone in my bedroom, reading, drawing, and creating stories in my head because the reality of my daily life was too much for me. Escapism is second nature, and loneliness is too.
I’ve started a project called Solo, I don’t know where it will lead me but that’s an idea I need to follow now, the first story that I want to tell, with watercolours and coloured pencils, without words. It’s a kind of story about loneliness & melancholy. These moments where you just face yourself, your deepest thoughts, your deepest fails & joys. Who are we when no one is watching?
This is the first time I’m actually working on a specific theme, not to create two or three images but ten or fifteen maybe more. I’m scared, I have no idea if I would be able to complete the idea by the end of Marsh but I needed a deadline.
That’s all for today, sorry for this very short letter ! As I’ve just got my 100th subscribers, thanks again for being here ❤️
See you soon
Stevelyne
Welcome 2023
Happy new year, may this year brings you courage to do all what you don't dare yet!
Love this solo project, I must say isolation and loss of memory are my two main fears!
As a newbie illustrator of sorts I look forward to the unfolding of the loneliness project. I feel like I made friends with loneliness years ago, so it's no longer an enemy for me. It's now more like an experience to be felt, explored and sometimes understood. Like it gives me access to myself in a particular way. Look forward to seeing your exploration.