Nathalie Tierce
Rites of Passage
Death Doula Los Angeles, Chinatown, LA, CA
March 22, 2024
A native of New York City, Nathalie Tierce honed her craft at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and L'ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After finishing her studies, she spent a decade in Europe, refining her skills as a commercial artist before returning to the States. Tierce's collaborations span iconic names—Shell Silverstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Rolling Stones—and contributions to major productions, including Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island, Tim Burton's Alice.
This body of work explores the idea of identity as a rite of passage. The repercussions of moving through the world as a searcher, consumer, fighter, or lover looking for a mate, as a hallmark of our existential experience in this life.
Diving into Tierce's paintings and drawings reveals an interplay of theater, film, and art. Her surreal fairy tales, shaped by borrowed tropes from myths and television, imbue characters with symbolism and depth taken from a woman's point of view.
In Tierce's process-based work, compositions and characters emerge organically from random paint, coffee, dirt, pastels, and ink marks. The evolution from spills and splatters to poignant expressions is a testament to her unique editing process, delving into the depths of texture and asking questions about her character's motivation and state of mind.
In the solace or chaos of solitary or multiple figures, Tierce captures the essence of universal emotions—fear, despair, frenzy, longing—wrapped in storybook attire with a raw, fever-dream edge. There is an uncomfortable beauty within her paintings and mixed media pieces, where humor dances with the absurd, navigating the intricacies of combative relationships with others and ourselves.
She's published three books, Fairy Tale Remnants, Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden and Chronicles of Fear, weaving her visual art seamlessly with prose. Her work has been compared to the great Edward Gorey by The Los Angeles Review of Books -Tierce participates in the Goreyesque tradition of destroying readers’ expectations for the work they have picked up — in this case, the picture book.
R.Crumb, the renowned American cartoonist, has called Nathalie - a genuine visionary artist with a direct line to her subconscious.
Video by L.A. Art Documents / www.laartdocuments.com