Ms. Tierce's second book, "Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden" follows her surreal prose and artwork in "Fairy Tale Remnants" (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2019).
(1888PressRelease) September 28, 2021 - The wild and luridly rendered "Pulling Weeds From a Cactus Garden" reflects the dark side of human interaction and alienation. Just like the act of pulling weeds from a cactus garden, it's tricky, and you can't do it without getting hurt. However, these dark tales of hazard deliver beauty and humor from otherwise threatening situations. The result -visual allegories more nourishing and easily digested than the circus of life around us.
Woven into this collection of artwork and prose is a revisitation of several Aesop Fables, stories that provide insight into surviving in a world where the cards are stacked against you. Like Aesop's fables, these stories use symbolism not only to illustrate but define vices.
Themes of alienation, struggle between our inner worlds, expectations of reality are the center of these hazardous tales. Characters in the book represent threats in a dystopian environment. They are symbolic tropes, finding themselves in moments of confrontation with themselves or those around them.
R.Crumb, in a personal letter to Nathalie Tierce, wrote, “You are a genuine visionary artist with a direct line to your subconscious.”
About the Artist/Author
Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden is Nathalie Tierce's second book. It follows her first book, Fairy Tale Remnants. Both were inspired by her mixed media paintings and drawings.
In her career as a professional artist, Ms. Tierce has worked on projects as diverse as productions for Shel Silverstein, Andrew Lloyd Weber, The Rolling Stones, period dramas for The BBC, feature films such as Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and painting murals for Disney.
Her relationship with theater and film nurtured her desire to connect to people through storytelling in her visual allegories.
Born and raised in New York City, Nathalie received her formal training at Pratt Institute in New York and The Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She then spent ten years in Europe refining her craft as a painter.
She maintains a studio in Glendale, CA, where she lives with her sculptor husband, son, and two cats.