Marie Foulquié (She/they)
I am an illustrator focused on storytelling and colour. I prefer to develop stories in the shape of comic books, and fill sketchbooks with pencil and watercolour drawings of characters saying things. While at GSA, I developed the use of acrylics, broadening my approach to texture and vibrant marks.
I come from a rural area in the east of France. My visual culture was built around the Belgian and very-liberated French-speaking comics and graphic novels published on the continent.
I have several projects of comic books and graphic novels sketched, inked and coloured that I mean to get published and in the meantime am developing a freelance practice as an author and illustrator.
Contact
Echoes (detail)
Aquarius
Aquarius is a triptych of self-portraits depicting the evolution of my self-image and the symbolisation of my inner world, spiritual, fictitious and intimate, drawing on astrology and symbolism. It started as a way to documents changes I went through during a time of reflecting and spiritual discoveries, and culminated into three paintings of 2 x .75 meters.
I used the symbol of Aquarius, the Water-Carrier, who receives and pours water out of two vases, as a metaphor for the inner transformation I had to make from the abuse I suffered to the kindness I want to embody. It feels logical to end my experience of school with this project on self-reflection, as it was school that marked me in the worst way in my formative years.
The paintings each represent an alternate self, either ruled by one aspect of the zodiac (sun/moon/rising) or different levels of the development of my consciousness and spirituality. The first one could be a corporeal self looking to untie blockages in love and intimacy; the second one experiences and makes sense of the world with their strong imagination, and the third one has achieved a higher state of consciousness through this imagination.
The works that had first inspired this project were 19th century historical paintings and portraits from the romanticist, pre-raphaelite and symbolist movements; their influence can be found in the change of format and in the poses of the figures I painted, as well as in the use of gold leaf and astronomic symbols. This work plays around the themes of body image, costume, colour, sexuality and kink, astrology and spirituality.
Aquarius the Water Carrier
Fellout (working title)
Fellout is an adaptation of the video game series Fallout into a webcomic. The composition of these pages is very much automatic and stream-of-consciousness like, as they aren’t intented to be published and read as such. I draw the story in the order in which the events
took place in my character’s life, keeping in mind when working that my comic pages, as I draw them, will look nothing like the final online publication. To show an example of what I aim for, I drew and published a teaser excerpt on a dedicated wordpress website, a dedicated Tumblr blog, and my personal Instagram. Please visit either of these to read the excerpt.
I included further down excerpts of the pages I’ve been working on the past year. I invite you to zoom in to read the more intricate, full-on pages.
Traces
Traces is a 60-odd pages comic book set in the future, about a wizard travelling the ruins of human civilization in search for a way to escape our ghosts. Zoom in to read.
Sketchbook work
As an illustrator, keeping a sketchbook is like having a journal or diary you record your reactions to the world around you in, except that these reactions are visual and experimental. These are some of my favourite pages filled in during my Postgraduate.
