Nathalia Suellen (born 20 February 1989) is a contemporary fine artist and commercial illustrator based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Entirely self-taught, Suellen’s developed a distinctive visual language from a combination of dark art and pop-surrealism. Her current artworks are born from a high-detailed mixture of photography, 3D and digital painting showing a signature style that blends symbolism, retro-futurism, classical art and dystopia with extremely colorful surrealistic worlds. Her main characters are often captured in scenes where something sad is about to happen, as if they were trapped in a bad dream. Despite her personal illustrations, Nathalia is mostly known by her commercial works and a notable clientele list which consists of musicians, photographers, best-selling writers as well as major companies including Random House, Penguin Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, McCann Erickson, Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Harry N. Abrams Books.
“I’m a dark artist by nature. Everything I touch tends to go dark. At the beginning, I used to produce more simple works because of lack of skill. For several times I tried to go a bit more wild but the result was horrible. My daily recipe was (model + background).
I could not work with my ideas because I was not prepared. I used to be a slave of graphic resources, they used to tell me what I should do, I had no chance to show myself. That’s the only bad thing about being recognized too early, People think you can’t evolve. Sometimes, it’s really good to be completely unknown so you have time to discover yourself, your style and technique. I always loved surrealism but in digital art it requires technique. Now I know where I’m going. I can work with surrealism and 3d (which gives me much more freedom than photography) and still merge all that with my old dark soul. It’s not a new style, it’s a better me.” – Nathalia Suellen (Conceptual Magazine)
