You will overcome this: illustrations by Grace Oh
Peter sits with Grace Oh, a digital artist who uses illustration to reflect and process life’s difficulties.
Grace Oh is a contemporary digital artist who lives and works in Bay Area, California. From a young age, she had an itch to bring ideas, stories, and visuals from her imagination onto paper. Like other kids, she drew on scratch paper but felt discouraged because she wasn’t “artistic enough”. It wasn’t until college where she began to rekindle her love for drawing.
There You Are
Inspired by editorials and children’s book illustrations, Grace emulated an artistic style that felt most authentic to her. Her work sparks long-lost, child-like innocence that makes us yearn for our younger days. Using soft colour palettes, she simplifies her surroundings as a way to process the complexities we face on a daily basis.
Reproduced with permission. Credit: Grace Oh
Dark Skies with Rain to Grow
Grace shared that she was born and raised a Christian her whole life and believes that her art helps to ground her back to her religious roots. “Faith is what grounds me”, she says, and drawing reminds herself to continue growing that faith.
Grace gathered her inspiration for this piece from her faith in God. Through difficult moments in life “it can be easy to put up an umbrella and ignore the pouring rain from dark gloomy skies. But I learned I needed to surrender myself to the rain and accept the reality I was in rather than running away from conflict.”
In times of struggle, her work is her way of self-reflection and forgiveness. It takes shape as a reminder that the world is simpler than she makes it out to be. She does not shy away from the pitfalls of life and emphasises that “as hard as life may be, life is a beautiful gift”.
Reproduced with permission. Credit: Grace Oh
The Letting Go We Need
I asked why she chooses to persistently draw a distinct motif of anatomical hearts. Although we cannot visualise how the world affects our hearts, Grace hopes to capture the truth that “what happens in and through our hearts is real. And I wanted to make it even more real and tangible by drawing it out.”
After college, Grace’s career accelerated as she started working as a designer. She learned that the capacities of our hearts are limited; too many commitments tie us down and restrict our creativity. In this piece, Grace shows how our heartstrings can become barbed wire, illustrating that “things that may feel good in the moment will deeply pain us in the long run”, and that when things start to feel this way, it may be time to make some cuts.
Reproduced with permission. Credit: Grace Oh
Abbracciame
Grace was only just starting her journey as a designer when the world collapsed from COVID-19. For Grace and many others, she was uncertain about her future. She was blessed to maintain her job remotely, but was not spared the impact of the pandemic on her mental health.
Grace was watching the news when it was reported that Italy was experiencing record high cases and death tolls. Stay-at-home quarantine had been mandated and many businesses were forced to close. Scrolling through social media, Grace watched videos of Italians singing and playing music on their balconies, and others dancing on rooftops. One man was playing a song called ‘Abbracciame’ which translates to ‘hug me’ on the trumpet while neighbours clapped and sang along.
She knew she had to draw this, and asked herself “How can I convey a shared feeling that we are experiencing right now?” and “How do I creatively translate an idea or concept into an illustration that can be easily consumed and digested?”
She wanted to capture this beautiful moment where a community of people found joy amidst hard times. That musicians could utilise their talents to rally their neighbors and their community was a “reminder of human resilience, the importance of community in the midst of physical separation, and the need for human connection and harmony.”
She does so with evergreen-toned palettes that seem to embrace small differences in shadows to subtly display the sun’s rays. Her piece is slow to reveal their borders, almost bringing the individuals who are standing on their rooftops closer together, as if to say: it is only distance, six feet in fact, that separates us.
Grace depicts these difficult concepts through her child-like illustrations, grappling with the grief inherent in an age where death was always around the corner. Grace’s work reminds us that art can be used to create “something beautiful out of what can be chaotic, messy, or painful”.
Reproduced with permission. Credit: Grace Oh
You Will Overcome This
After mandated quarantine was lifted, it felt like exiting out of a wasteland of disequilibrium towards an oasis, a place of hope. Grace uses her canvas to convey her words. There is no hidden or complex meaning, it is simply a parting message. So simple, in fact a child could tell you the same: “You can, and you will overcome this”.
Reproduced with permission. Credit: Grace Oh
You can find out more about Grace’s work on her Instagram @bygraceoh