Artist Kime Buzzelli creates gauzy, ethereal watercolour paintings of pretty girls, 

“The main idea was sort of this story of these women who may have abandoned their lives and picked up and discovered this ‘someplace else,’ maybe a ghostly element/ witchcraft vibe.” Kime Buzzelli’s illustrations present the women in her work with her hazily overlapping merging images of girls surrounded by nature, patterns, creatures and text reading cryptic phrases such as ‘The strongest weapon in the world; the teenage girl.

"She creates paintings, illustrations and fashion-based installations. Invested in a vocabulary of desire, nature, witchcraft and superstition, Buzzelli's paintings are essentially dark love poems. They are inhabited by wicked women, wild animals, secret societies, and places of wonder...Tapping her fascination with the drama of other people’s lives Buzzelli creates narrative vignettes that both obscure and reveal. Inserting brief poetic text into the compositions, Kime creates juxtapositions that cloud an immediate reading of the work; it is unclear if the words serve as the thoughts of her subjects, or an omniscient proposition. These bits become suggestions or clues to the fictive lives of her subjects that the viewer is left to unravel."

Kime Buzzelli is also inspired by the love of clothes, an addiction to fashion magazines and pictures, listening to old movies while playing music, and I feel this is a similar form of collecting and researching to my own, as to select imagery to draw from I have been collecting film stills from old movies, and I will be using scenes and stills in the film where a female character appears to be going through some kind of trauma or confusion.

Mercedes Helnwein

A feeling of mystery is also created in the work of Mercedes Helnwein, although the girls in her work appear immaculately styled and dressed, there is also something eerie and not quite right.

 “Gorgeously styled women populate Helnwein’s pencil drawings and paintings… the narrative quality of her work- which in some instances resemble film stills gives them the sense of having just committed (or at least plotted) some sort of crime."

Mercedes Helnwein’s drawings remind me of the work of Cindy Sherman, as they appear to look like film stills and her work consists of predominantly women. The girls Mercedes draws seem to look as if they could be extras from a 1960s Nouvelle Vague film, dressed in mini-dresses with backcombed hair, which I feel resembles Sherman’s work, as presented in her work are female stereotypes.

“I originally wanted my films to appear like real film stills that you would find in a cheap bin at a thrift store. What I was trying to do with the film stills was make people make up characters and imagine a whole film based on them'”.

- Cindy Sherman

I enjoyed being able to see some of her work over the summer at the NewArt Gallery Walsall, at the show Behind The Mask which involved characters representing women of wealth and status.