Magnetic and surreal, d’Errico’s arresting subjects, their piercing eyes and dynamic colors, are often juxtaposed with the cute, creepy, bizarre, and the otherworldly.
I reviewed Camilla d’Errico’s hardback Rainbow Children back in 2016 (short version: I loved it) so I was delighted to see her new book Dappled Daydreams was just released by Dark Horse. Keep reading for preview images and a review.
d’Errico’s work can make people uncomfortable, with the combination of childlike eyes, pouting infant mouths, and mildly sexual energy. (There’s no porn in her work, but there is the occasional boob.) I choose to believe it exists in the same space as manga: adolescent features on women who are definitely mature. I get that not everybody’s on board, it’s not my favorite element either. But the uncomfortableness of it is part of the experience.
It just feels decadent to linger on all the details: the crisp lines combined with soft shadows and the ridiculously intricate gradients in hair and skin. The dripping rainbows, sometimes as lush face paint on her figures, other times as bucketfulls of thick color that coat cheeks and bodies and spill into chromatic puddles on the ground. (Sometimes it’s rainbow-edged slices of skulls and open wounds. Like I said, making people uncomfortable is often the point.)
Butterflies feature prominently in all of her work, but this collection also introduces bees, either attending the main subject or on their own in her whimsical bee-themed Zodiac. (The non-bee-themed Zodiac series is also gorgeous.)
Skulls, worms, spiders and snakes make up the theme of the Captivating Chroma chapter, along with more grays and sepia tones than in other sections. That chapter wraps up with a series of gorgeous black and white sketches of mythological creatures, like gorgons, sphinxes, and even a jackalope.
The Sublime Spectrum chapter slowly works its way through the rainbow: red parrots and ladybugs, firey orange tigers and foxes, yellow fish and dragons, green lizards and butterflies (the princess cuddling a baby gryphon in that section was one of my favorites), blue lobsters and hypogryphs, indigo octopuses and snails. All with their attendant girls and stunning detail.
“Lush” is a great word for describing d’Errico’s art. So is delicious, luxurious, and unsettling. It falls in the realm of “oddly satisfying” for me, a thing you look at that comforts you even if you can’t explain why, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it does the same for you.
Preview images and description courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.