Fantasise with Elle-Louise Burguez

Words, styling and creative direction: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

Artwork and styling: Elle-Louise Burguez

Elle-Louise Burguez makes you wanna take a dive into a tropical watermelon pool, escape into a technicolour peach world and have a dreamtime about love and loneliness in a pastel rainforest.

The Sunshine Coast-based artist’s work has the same ethereal escapism of Cicely Mary Barker’s illustrations while still being pervaded by a kind of raw uncomplicated emotion.

“I want people to look at my art and just feel playful again.

“It’s kind of child-like and taking people back into that child-like view of life where everything’s playful, everything’s fun, there’s not too many worries, and simplifying life.

“And I guess as soon as they look at it, I want them to feel either really positive or maybe it will evoke a sad emotion in them. But as long as they’re feeling something in my art, that’s really great.”

Elle’s works seem unadulterated with a lo-fi purity. Ostensibly they seem simple and euphoric. But in actuality many are highly detailed and don’t always present innocent blissful themes.

The scenes, her characters, are in a way mesmerising. They can envelop you in a dreamy wonderland, which is both enticing and melancholy.

It comes from all different places.

“Sometimes it’s really personal,” says Elle.

“I might recreate a scene in my day or something I’ve done and enhance it to make it a bit more interesting.

“Or I might see something on the internet or in a magazine, like a piece of furniture that I like and I’ll draw that or I’ll just randomly create other stuff around it.

“I think I just really daydream when I do it and just maybe all different random influences come together at once and then they just explode.”

Elle’s family is laced with musicians; her late grandfather was in a jazz band, she has a pianist for a father and many of her extended family members teach music.

For a while, Elle thought her vocation lay in music.

“When I was a kid I’d always draw, just for fun.

“I’d literally draw so much and make my own magazines and stuff and design stuff.

“I kind of gave that up when I got older and focused more on music and film.

“Then I think I broke up with my boyfriend or something else and thought, ‘I need to do something, I need to focus my energy into something else.’

“And I just went out and bought a packet of Textas from the shop, which I love, those Connect-A-Pens, and went home and started drawing and really loved it.

“As soon as I started sharing what I did, that’s when I became obsessed with it.”

Elle-Louise works with Textas, watercolour paper, watercolour pens, watercolours and just fine ink pens to draw detail.

Like many artists, drawing is a process of catharsis for Elle. It’s part of that deep mediative quality of absolute focus, distraction and ultimately creation.

“Well a lot of the time it’s really healing for me and it’s like my escape and if I’m feeling a certain way and I draw, I know I’m going to feel 100 per cent better afterwards.

“The whole process of it is really enjoyable for me. Just getting lost in my own world, it is escapism.”

Take a minute. Let yourself get absorbed into Elle’s transcendental paradise. All everything is for a moment is just your own private Elysium.

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