Natacha Birds "I have a fascination for creatures, poetry, astral travel"
A jack-of-all-trades artist known for her astonishing flower women, Natacha Birds decompartmentalizes the corseted universe of art by expressing her creativity in many media. Meeting with a passionate multi-talent, whose work with dreamlike accents merges poetry and drawing.
Can you tell us more about your background, and how your artistic vocation took shape?
I have always had a very strong attraction for art. As a child, colored pencils were immediately my favorite toys. I spent my time doodling, painting and cutting. I was a collector of art fragments.
At the beginning it was a child's hobby, but when the studies and the choices related to my future arrived, art was obvious. I couldn't see myself anywhere else, and neither could my loved ones. It was the thing that obviously made me the happiest and was the most sincere.
So after college I entered an applied arts school in Paris, which confirmed my desire and my lifelong passion for this field. I searched for years, wandering from photography to graphic design and finally it was my first love for painting that came back to me during confinement. The return to painting reminded me of the intoxication of my childhood for art and it is undoubtedly the strongest revelation that I have known about myself so far.
What were your major inspirations, whether in art but also in cinema or in pop culture?
The world of Japanese animation and manga is one of my biggest inspirations: the sky of Your Name and its meteorite fall, the stories of junji Ito about souls and splitting like Tomie or "the sleeping room" ...I have a fascination for monsters, creatures, poetry, astral travel, slowness and I find all of this in manga.
Your paintings and your works in general give pride of place to color. What are your favorite colors, and why?
My paintings are often dominated by pink, blue and lilac hues. These are colors that evoke the sky, the dream, the sweetness, the dreamlike but also the astral. I love linking them to green (reminiscent of nature) very blue, it's a warm/cold accord that I find very deep. Hilma af Klint inspires me a lot in her color combinations.
Your works celebrate form and the feminine in all its diversity and multiplicity, which you often associate with flowers. Can you tell us more about how you started this analogy, and how the flower women were born?
In my mind, every woman is a flower. There is the notion of aesthetics and poetry, certainly, but also that of plurality, of diversity. Like flowers, we have all our carnal and emotional particularities, our singularities, our strengths and our flaws. By coming together, the flower women unite their energies, compose bouquets and protect each other. I wanted a "concept" that reveals femininity while preserving women, and which is similar to a tale or a legend, to the famous monsters and creatures that I love so much. The woman-flower, by her hybrid side, is a symbol of communion between humans and nature, but also of peaceful struggle against patriarchy, it is a state.
Each canvas I create represents a chapter in my story, from the birth of the flower woman to her empire. They are thought of as a world in itself, as the coexistence of multiple perceptions of reality, from the most pragmatic to the most fanciful.
Associating a flower with a body is not just a question of desire or color. It is a game of analysis, observation, sensations and intuitions. By looking at each woman, I detect her share of poetry, I decipher the emotions she releases or buries, I play with the harmony of shapes until finally finding the flower that corresponds to her and will pay homage to her.
You are followed by many followers on Instagram and collaborate with many brands. To what extent have social networks revolutionized our daily relationship with art, in your opinion?
In my opinion, social networks make it possible to give an amplitude to art, galleries and museums remain the houses of art and magical places for me. But they are unfortunately not part of our daily life, at least for me living in the Dordogne. Our phone, yes. Telling myself that if I want to see art, if I need inspiration, a window on an artist, I just have to open Instagram is a real chance and opportunity. Art becomes "easy", open to everyone for free and without borders. And as an artist, Instagram can even become a place of personal exhibition, which we can manage completely independently like self-publishing. It's an incredible showcase that obviously works with "the real world", with galleries and art world actors who are increasingly taking the power of social networks into consideration, and I hope that this phenomenon does not t is only in its infancy.
