Week 25: “Princess M”
“Collapsing Structures”

Find her on her website, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Etsy.

If it hadn’t become abundantly clear by now, I love bright colors, especially of the watercolor/smoke-and-wisps variety. You will also come to realize in the coming weeks that I love surrealism as well.

This is why pop surrealism–and artists like Princess M–make my artistic heart sing.

Princess M–Mia–is a creative creature inspired by tattoos, street art, and anime. The piece I chose to feature, “Collapsing Structures,” reminds me of trash polka–a fairly new tattoo style that originated in Germany.

Often, her art plays with negative space to create pieces that at first seem abstract but in fact hold a different image, like the optical illusions where you can see two different things depending on how you look.

She has also played with sugar skulls and Day of the Dead motifs, and her older stuff tends to look similar to stained glass–or, rather, the painted stained glass plastic projects of my childhood.

She also has done animal portraits, and seems especially fond of birds.

If there’s one thing beyond art that Mia is apparently great at, it’s finding a way to monetize her talent–the dream, right? She sells phone and laptop cases, prints, buttons, and even runs a website offering classes, workshops, and private tutoring to fellow artists.

Mia says she uses watercolor and ink because of the yin and yang function in them, and that she forms ideas around an emotion she wants to express. Looking at her pieces, dripping in curved lines and swathed in color, the emotions can often be ambiguous–the Disney-esque blue songbird above is named “Vengeance.” However, I think this is some of her charm, and what draws a person in–along with the many intricate details coupled with purposeful vagueness, of course.

Not only that, but Mia is still a young artist and her style is constantly growing and expanding, improving from an already impressive starting point to something to rival those much older than her. That’s the kind of inspiration I like to discover and share.