wildscape. literary journal

Title: Pater // Artist: Camellia Paul

about the piece

“Pater” is a mixed-media drawing made with black ink pens, alcohol markers, colored pencils, and layered acrylic, allowing rough brushstrokes and visible texture to remain part of the surface. I began by sketching the house and body in ink, deliberately keeping the lines uneven and slightly warped, then built color in restless layers—dry strokes over wet, pigment dragged and allowed to bleed—to create a sense of pressure and instability. The red forms were added last, not as background but as intrusion: storms, fissures, and emotional noise pressing down on the structure of home and self. The piece explores the idea of inheritance—emotional, architectural, and bodily—where the house becomes a metaphor for familial memory and the self crouched beneath it bears the weight of what cannot be held upright anymore. The cracked roof and spiraling sky mirror internal fracture, while the curled figure of the young woman suggests both self-protection and exhaustion. I wanted the work to feel loud without being literal, intimate without sentimentality. The visible hand, the refusal to smooth or “correct” marks, is intentional: this is a drawing that insists on staying raw. What I want the world to know is that this piece was made quickly but not casually—it is an act of release, a confrontation with how violence, especially the domestic kind, grief, and love can coexist in the same inherited space, and how the body remembers even when the house pretends to stand.

about the artist // Camellia Paul