INTUITIVE VOCABULARIES
LAURA STIEG & CARLOTTA DI STEFANO
Laura Stieg is an illustrator whose work draws attention to the holistic dimensions of shape and colour. As a communication design student at HAW Hamburg, she became interested in how objects caught shadows and light. Drawing became a tool for her to relax, slow down and take in her surroundings. “One night I was sitting in a bar and I suddenly felt like all shadows were blue and not black,” she explains, “That’s kind of where my colour journey began. I started putting colours next to each other to see how they worked together.”
Untitled | 2021
Untitled | 2021
“I don’t draw and paint to evoke something,” she continues, “it’s more comparable to keeping a diary, like meditation.” Her process is similarly instinctive, never drawing from photos or working with preliminary sketches. It’s simple, she insists, “I sit down with paper and crayons and draw what I see or feel.” Through Cluster, Laura hopes to connect with other artists and get familiar with their different approaches to illustration. Right now, she’s working on a series of A2 woodcuts using a lost form technique which requires continuous work over several months. “Usually I draw super quick, it’s refreshing but challenging to think about these woodcuts for such a long time,” she added.
Out of these shadows arise organic shapes that seem to speak to each other in a secret code, like dancers leaning toward or away from each other, mimicking each other through colour, or conversely, distinguishing themselves against one another. “When I see shadows, I naturally imagine them in colours,” she told Cluster,
“at some point I even told myself to stop imagining paintings because I realised that I stop drawing at that point, already knowing how they look.” For Laura, influenced by the likes of Hockney and Matisse, this stylistic choice comes naturally - intuition leads as she channels her colourful shadows to the page.
Untitled | 2021
Pattern 1
The work of Carlotta di Stefano leads with colourful textures and patterns. Although she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Venice, Carlotta considers herself a self-taught artist as she found her interests divergent from those of the institutional setting. Strongly influenced by the Art Brut she has recently chosen to focus on illustration for children and is increasingly experimenting with digital techniques to achieve a higher level of precision in her work.
Similarly to the work of Laura, her illustrations and creative process have a strong holistic element. Many of her works feature motifs that relate to organic and natural forms, always in strong, textured colours; circles, semi-circles, crescents, leaves, stars and wings are repeated to form a unique stylistic vocabulary. Though this style arose naturally, it took many years of steady work to hone her visual voice, “when I don’t get something right, I work on it until I get a result that satisfies me,” she told Cluster, “in general, I like to try and evolve rather than staying in my comfort zone.”
Pattern 5
Pattern 4
There’s a poetic sensibility to her work born from following her intuition and not over-conceptualising, “I tend to favour the aesthetic value of the work over the conceptual one,” she added. When creating a new piece, Carlotta starts by making colourful textures with paint and collage. She then fills digital silhouettes with scanned materials. As part of Cluster, she hopes to reach more people through her work and connect with other artists. Currently, Carlotta is publishing a series of Christmas-inspired works on her online channels each day for the whole of December.
Pattern 3
The painter Hilma Af Klint once said of her work, “the pictures were painted directly through me.” Likewise, these artists favour instinct over reason, channelling colour and form like conduits. Through their lyrical use of simple shapes and organic motifs, both Laura and Carlotta have created strong visual vocabularies that make their work instantly recognisable.
Work by both Laura Stieg and Carlotta Di Stefano can be viewed on the Cluster Illustration platform
and purchased through our Cluster Illustration Online Shop.
Thank you for reading,
Stephanie Gavan & Cluster Team.