The Girl Drawing

Emma Tingård is a self-taught Swedish artist based in Stockholm. Her artworks, mainly portraits of strangers with captivatingly odd features, aim at depicting her personal insight into the model´s personality, which translates into ample strokes of vivid colors on a graffiti inspired outline; this technical approach is particularly evident in her series of street art driven works. "All my body of work is based on two basic ideas: the color communicability and movement by improvisation. My creative process starts with a feeling, an unspoken image with an end result that often surprises not only my audience but also myself. It is like a game where the final object dwells in the unconscious, waiting to be unraveled. A timeless process without framed thoughts or words. Portraits are a recurrent theme. I love the human face. You can learn so much about a person by simply looking at them closely. What they have been through leaves a mark and my intention is to be able to interpret those marks into my art. My ultimate challenge is finding the specific features in a face, a bridge to cross from me the portraitist to the portrayed. I do not plan beforehand whom I will portrait, I could be walking down a street and fall in love with someone’s characteristics: big ears, prominent noses, or nostalgic eyes. Faces with a lot of character attracts me. It’s usually much more interesting to portrait someone who is not “perfect” according to the conventional standards. And if they are, I’ll often make changes to make them more real and faithful to my vision. I am not interested in creating paintings to resemble photographs. I want to translate people’s personality, or even their soul; through the colors I see when I observe them. I am an autodidact artist. I decided early on not to choose the classic path where the fine arts education is an integral part but instead go my own way where there is no right or wrong, no preconception about what it is ugly or beautiful. I wanted to let my own design language develop without framing my mental approach. I get my inspiration from what speaks to me in that precise moment. It could be a documentary, photograph in a newspaper, a mural I walk by, the texture of a fabric or people I run into on the street. The ultimate mission I believe I have is to translate these impressions into an art piece. To create a different dimension where the viewer meets reality by the way I see it."