Art Obsession - Painter Fatima Ronquillo

Whilst going down one of many rabbit holes on Pinterest recently (this one concerned paintings of Victorian lovers’ eyes - can highly recommend) I discovered the work of artist Fatima Ronquillo. Fatima is a self-taught painter who combines old master techniques with a playful modern sensibility to create a world where art history meets with imagined characters from literature, theatre and opera. The collection of her work titled Florilegium are just that - a collection of literary extracts on which her paintings are based. The paintings are accompanied by short texts, poems or sonnets, such as William Blake’s The Garden of Love, The First Jasmines by Rabindranath Tagore or paragraphs from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Other collections have names such as Spellbound, Flora and Fauna, Mythologies, Devotion and my personal favourite; Mad Enchantment.

Fatima’s use of vivid colours and incredible attention to detail, paired with mythical motifs and animals transports you to another world and are both spellbinding and madly enchanting. No wonder her work has appeared in A Magazine Curated By, an international bi-annual publication by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. Which one is your favourite?