Sella Molenaar is a freelance illustrator based in Amsterdam. She has already worked with big names such as; Dolce & Gabbana, H&M and L’officiël and also organizes illustration workshops with which she hopes to inspire people to get creative themselves. Sella is fascinated by the feminine silhouette and the influence that fashion can have on it. This is an often recurring subject in her Illustrations. Her work celebrates sensuality and aesthetics and explores the definition of femininity in a world where gender is increasingly fluid. She herself defines her style as “controlled impulsivity”, always balancing between control and technique on the one hand and intuition, minimalism and endless freedom on the other. It is precisely the uncontrolled lines, small “mistakes”, and things that happen in the moment that bring her drawing to life.
“With my work I would like to celebrate femininity, soft and hard, strong and vulnerable. Capturing the female body in all its beautiful forms as an endless search for the definition of her being. My drawings therefore become a quest of finding myself as well and who i am as a woman. How freely I dare to move myself in this masculine world. To what extent I adapt or dare to be a woman, unapologetically. Essentially all of my work is a self-portrait.
I want to make drawings that are sex positive. That believe in love without boundaries or rules. That show the beauty of things that are often covered. That see women as autonomous sexual beings with a right to pleasure and sovereignty over her own body.
I want to give attention to the sensual, not only in subject but also in execution. I want to draw women who feel themselves completely, embrace their bodies, are in touch with their senses and dare to be themselves, but I also want to draw her in a way that does this justice. I want to be able to sweep the material, smell the paint, put each line on paper with intent and go home at the end of the day with my hands full of ink stains.
I want to marvel, see beauty, and honor everything beautiful. Make drawings that sometimes show no more than two colors, lines or shapes that compliment each other nicely. I want to say a lot with very little. Let the void speak. Let that one vibration in the line tell its story and let the essence be enough.
I want to make my drawings in freedom and with pleasure and I want you to see that!”
The role of art has changed over time. How would you describe your role as a modern day artist?
Before the quality of art was measured by the way it depicted reality. Now there are better and easier ways to do that, so now for me art is more about personal stories and the unique signature of the
artist. The paper can be my biggest mirror and shows me my own assumptions and preconceptions. And it’s through my illustrations that I can also challenge them. For example, I studied Fashion and struggled a lot with my weight and for a long time I only drew skinny white girls, with very angry faces. It was only since I began to question this body image and starting to draw other body types that I’ve started to embrace the softer sides of myself. For me my art reflects my own process of growth and how I feel about myself and is therefore very personal. That’s why I also empathize so much on embracing imperfections and love all what happens in the moment. Those are the moments that my own signature and true colours show and what make my illustrations “mine”.
What kind of art do you have hanging on your walls?
I only have illustrations in my home. Some of colleagues I admire and some of my own illustrations that are dear to me for several reasons; first experiments, milestones in my artistic process or career, or just personal favorites.
What is the most unexpected source of inspiration for you?
Just people I meet in daily life. Don’t know if that’s unexpected, but the locations or moments this inspiration occurs sometimes is. It happens that I bump into someone in Albert Heijn with a certain look, posture, walk or outfit that makes me want to rush to my studio and draw it!
What does your ideal working day look like? What time of the day do you feel most creative?
I don’t like mornings and feel most creative during the afternoon and at night. I like to sleep until I naturally wake (I hate alarms!), do some yoga, have breakfast, drink coffee, maybe answer some emails and go to my studio to draw around noon. If I have to work a deadline I prefer to pull an allnighter instead of waking up early.
With what kind of art did you fill your notebooks as a child?
Even as a kid I already loved to draw and I’ve drawn people for as long as I can remember. As a teenager I wanted to become a fashion designer and sketched clothes and drew people wearing them during class and at the time I was supposed to do homework. Before that I also had a phase where I wanted to be an interior architect and I have tons of sketches of a cruise ship design I’ve worked on for several years! The size of this project and the amount of detail I’ve put in this project as a say 10 year old makes it still quite impressive to be honest!