English artist Katrina Sesum’s work is populated by owls and foxes and bears, corvids and toads, moths and maidens, with flourishes of fauna and crowns of crescent moons. Her watercolors and pencil art invite you into sweet, dreamy woodland scenes that always feel touched by moonlight. We wondered where these scenes come from and what fuels these myths that have us so charmed.
As a child, Sesum says, she often spent weekends at her grandparents’ house in the bluebell woods in Yorkshire. There she passed endless hours exploring the woods with her grandad, who knew all the animals and how to spot signs of where they’d been. That’s where her love for the woods began, and she still goes as often as she can to explore, clear her mind, and find inspiration.
Also, for as long as she can remember, she has been drawn to the night, and to night-related imagery. It’s when she can focus and feels most attuned to her creative forces. And she is, of course, in love with the moon—her companion and guide through the darkness, literally and figuratively—and all the aspects of life that run just under the surface of the day-to-day. She’s inspired too by her dreams, dreamlike imagery, and the surreal, the thoughts and beings that exist on the edge of perception: those owls with shimmering crescent moons on their foreheads, the bears that seem to be trailing stars.
The animals in her work are often representative of particular people in her life, she says—family, friends, and other loved ones. “The bears are the ones who ground me or provide strength and guidance in some way. Owls, I can’t quite pin down. They’re a little more nebulous.” She likes the contrast between the more earthy, grounded bear, and the flighty owl, which is what keeps them so frequently together in her mind. They’re two aspects of her own personality that she’s not always able to keep in sync.
Her studio now looks out onto her garden, and she finds it easy to lose track of time watching the birds, bats, foxes, frogs, hedgehogs, and the occasional deer that visit. She tries to keep her garden as hospitable to wildlife as possible. It’s always a delight, she says, to see the multitude of creatures that make use of it. Whether or not any of those creatures shimmer or trail stars, we’ll let her keep to herself.
Visit Katrina Sesum on Instagram @katrinasesum.
