New York-based producer-illustrator Willa Jones explains her creative process.
While I can often be indecisive, I have a clear instinct of who I want to draw — often wrinkles and folds call to me, though sometimes a distinctive scowl, or enigmatic eyes. Lately, I’ve shifted from sketching strangers to characters on screen and the artists behind them. Usually these intriguing figures — from inside subway cars to stars in shows, are strong women. I’ve realized that they’re also mostly mothers, seemingly living multiple lives in one. Whether somehow juggling a few little ones on the train, or sitting in silence, or struggling with the sacrifices they’ve made for their children, the mothers I’ve witnessed — in life and in film — seem to carry so many sides of themselves and stories, inspiring me to sketch them, even from afar.
This all started about five years ago; sketching at first on the train, and then snapping photos so I could draw at home, and not while swishing in the subway cars. (Each method — from life and from photos, brought about very interesting conversations!) I started with pen and paper, never having a plan or goal, just getting lost in the lines of a face. I then tried gouache for the first time; a thicker type of watercolor, and loved how fluid it felt. I tend to use a paintbrush like it’s a liquid pen. I pick up different colors as I move through different parts of a face, which make the ordinary a bit more surreal— all intuitively and mostly in one go.
This love for drawing portraits seeped outside subway cars to strangers seen on road trips and journeys outside the country. I wanted to capture the people who stuck with me for the stories they shared; the owner of a bed and breakfast in a coal mining town in Colorado, a couple selling textiles they made on a corner in Mexico City, a capoeira teacher in Salvador, Brazil.
When the pandemic hit, suddenly constant contact with strangers became a thing of the past. At home, as a lover and producer of TV, I devoured shows and was stunned by faces on screen, captured by artful cinematography and color. I wanted to learn more about the women who starred in and made the work I was in awe of — from writer, actor, and director Michaela Coel to director and photographer Agnès Varda. Both of their work is strikingly personal, bringing you into a character’s whole world, in both the ordinary and the dark. Varda’s quirky, vulnerable films are portraits; many of mothers, following them as they struggle and find happiness and themselves. And her love for faces comes through in them — she put it better than I could; in an interview she said, “Faces are all I see. They seem real — more real than conversations. . . Where I am, there are only words and faces.”