Introducing Ella

Hello! I’m Ella, your local rose-tinted romantic who can’t help but romanticise every element of my own life and everyone else’s! I’m an illustrator and a fine art student, I also write poetry and sing… basically I’m creative at heart with lots of feelings that come pouring out into every form of creative expression I can find my hand at!

Me in my own little illustrated dreamworld

I’ve always been like this. From a very young age I would scribble all over anything I could get my hands on. My mum’s books, my dad’s records, the walls of our flat, absolutely nothing was safe from the hands of baby Ella, itching to make! I’m so grateful to my parents for allowing me to keep on scribbling all over their possessions; creative expression is a real lifeline for me, something that makes me feel safe, helps me reflect and understand myself, something that grounds me. The only thing that has changed is that now I have different mediums of making, developed practices, and usually the things I make stay within the boundaries of a sketchbook (I can’t make any promises though!)

My baby drawings

Currently I have two main artistic practices; a fine art practice which is rooted in mark making and an illustration practice! I have always done both of these. The mark making is incredibly intuitive, a coping mechanism through which I can keep myself grounded and end up recording myself and my emotions in the process. The illustration process is much more reflective, collaborative, romantic and rose-tinted. I guess you could imagine my mark making to be like the present tense, immediate and in the moment, an outpouring of feeling, while my illustration work is in the past tense, reflecting on the feelings I have already felt, a soft look back on my own memories or someone else’s.

An example of my illustration work- titled 'Home'

Memory is something which seems to seep into everything I make. Have you ever returned to a place you used to live and felt like you could bump into previous versions of yourself, selves and times that you’ve moved past so that you no longer have ownership of them anymore, they exist within their own times, within their own parameters? That is what my mark making pieces are to me, past selves captured within the marks I have made.

I suppose where illustration differs from this is that the past self that I am attempting to capture is often not my own. That is one of the main draws to illustration for me, the collaboration and community in it. The aim of illustration is to communicate, to translate feelings or words into your own visual language, conveying a ~vibe~ for the reader, meaning that even if I am illustrating my own work the practice always has collaboration at heart.

I suppose the ~vibe~ that I tend to put across to the viewer is usually very emotive and romantic. As a person I often feel overwhelmed by love, by the intensity of nostalgia, and these things shape my illustrative work. Little motifs have crept into my work over the years, from little hearts to a familiar rose-tinted colour palette; there is a definite feminine energy in all that I make.

I am soft, sensitive – throughout my life I’ve heard myself referred to as fragile (my surname, Fradgley, is only a small step away!) and while it may have been a critique of my emotions, I believe there is real value in feeling intensely, real strength in being soft. I’m glad that the heart shaped glasses through which I view the world is evident in the drawings I make!

And I suppose that would be my parting words of advice! Don’t be afraid to embrace your vulnerabilities, there is beauty in feeling, there is real worth in being soft! Radical love and expressing creatively all of the emotions you feel can lead to real healing and to creating not only beautiful pieces of artwork, but community and change too.