Edgbaston High: Pupil Editor
'People who inspire me' - Lana K. writes about the Swedish artist Emma Zonn
'As a someone who has a passion for many forms of art, I am always interested and in admiration of others work and their techniques, but an artist who has greatly inspired me to create pieces with people in them is a Swedish artist called Emma Zonn, based in Stockholm, who mainly focuses on fashion illustrations and truly capturing the essence of being a teenage girl. Zonn’s art has a very fashionable aesthetic, and she often draws and paints scenes with young women and teenagers having fun with their friends, in the medium of watercolour and black pen.
One reason why I find her work so inspiring and appealing is that it has a great sense of nostalgia from being a young girl and carefree, as she often paints them socialising and doing activities together, such as shopping, going to cafés and having sleepovers, which are relatable to myself and many others. For me, her work makes me feel as though I am being transported back into my childhood where I would have the same joy of spending time with friends, without any worries, but also implements the ways in which many teenage girls spend time with each other. The style of painting also is a reminder of the many colouring books which I had when I was smaller, centred around clothes and the art in styling them to create cohesive outfits, so her work is also a form of fashion inspiration, as she continuously paints with the current style trends in mind. As a fashion-textiles student too, I find her also very inspiring in this sense as she is very creative in how she makes her characters stand out, and also suggests their emotions without even giving them clear expressions, as they are often suggested in the art’s background and environment.
Moreover, technically, Emma Zonn’s pieces are made with such care and precision, by including many details in both the characters and the backgrounds, which brings such a bright tone of life to the paintings. I also like how they are painted rather gently with watercolour, to enhance her dreamy aesthetic, before outlining and adding in details with a black fineliner to create a balanced amount of structure in her work. I have recently been inspired by her style and her works and have attempted to create a couple of pieces with references to hers, as well as with changes to the characters to be representative of myself and my friends.
Overall, I find Zonn’s work to be very aesthetically pleasing with her ideas and colour schemes being very relatable, and I simply love the way in which she paints her characters to be trendy and elegant but not exactly observational, as it allows the work to seem fictional and therefore like a storybook.'
December 2024