ABOUT

‘This is the Story about the land that was built on Song.’

Gracia Carr is an illustrative artist based in rural Bedfordshire, England. Recognised for her simple depiction of famous faces, she captures moments that matter, taking them from a saved folder in the audience’s phone, to a collection they value on their wall. She balances realism and conceptual symbolism, using a rotation of coloured pencils, gouache, oil and charcoal pencils to translate a land that is known well by the world. She uses social media to tell her story and to show her process; not only in the outcomes, but the development of ideas, her inspiration, all in an effort to hold down the fort of traditional storytelling. 

Her career began in Marketing; having a natural knack for written communication and blue-sky thinking, she recognised the importance of myth and make-believe. Being a millennial baby, she grew up in an era of classic Disney animation. Her escape was often rooted in traditional animation, spell-bound by the pull of the story, the characters and the illustrative scenery. Now noticing that nostalgia is something herself and the modern world is craving, she serves to bring old classics and modern culture together. 

Her practice explores the fantastical element of such storytelling, drawing to the narratives that exist around the sound itself - the stage, the atmosphere, the symbolism, the audience, and the feeling that remains long after the grand finale. With the success of modern musical artists such as RAYE and Olivia Dean, her own experience of these albums scratched an itch she didn’t know existed - the resurgence of orchestral, soulful music in popular culture. 

Using gouache for romantic, cinematic palettes, she creates staged narrative scenes inspired by performance, portraiture, and cultural moments in music. Influenced by traditional tapestry, old animation, and the visual language of specific album eras, her paintings turn sound into scenes and moments into myth.

Naming her first collection “This is the Story about the land that was built on Song,” she emphasises the need for tradition to be preserved throughout music, cultural and illustrative art. Playing on classic fairytales narratives, twisted together with modern scenes that hold cultural weight, she concludes that music is the foundation of experience. Both for the artist, and the audience. Individual identities, including professional, artistic and performative ones, sit at the root of understanding: understanding each other, understanding the world, and understanding our own experiences. How we tell the story changes the feeling behind it. 

Each piece acts as both archival and fairytale: preserving the emotional world that exists around music long after the performance ends, and how this allows interpretation, and reinterpretation of our own lived experiences. 

How else do we see the world, if not romantically?