Biography

NATALIETTE (also known as THE ANGRY HEDONIST) enjoys illustrating awkward women, often in uneasy dilemmas, with a heavy dose of macabre and irony. Her art tells of life’s little stories: from personal insecurities to fascisms, from self-confessed obsessions to her own ridiculous philosophies.

Born in the super metropolis of Singapore and currently residing there with much exasperation and many dreams of wanderlust. Nataliette, having grown up in the sterile concrete jungles of city life, is also sadly a victim of this modernness with flagrant materialism and fearless grouse, oblivious un-worldliness and appallingly grievous in her own mother tongue.

Growing up, she was an obedient child with normal loving parents who perhaps worked a little too much. She was mainly raised by a grandmother who only spoke dialect and whom she (regretfully) never once spoke kindly to since the onset of teenage angst. Instead of conquering playgrounds with her unruly cousins, she preferred staying home playing make-believe with her younger sister (whom she constantly bullied). She wrote stories and kept volumes of sketchbooks where she made drawings of girls in pretty dresses.

A typical run-of-the-mill Singaporean in her scholarly pursuits, Nataliette dreamed of becoming a doctor. Ideally the specimen with a scalpel in hand and blood the main accessory to her scrubs. Amidst pre-university, she experienced a peculiar epiphany. It concluded in a resentment of the academic path she had taken. Upon completing her Science education, she took a gamble and enrolled into a local art school.

Three years later in the March of 2007, she held her graduation show at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, displaying a short film she had produced (with two other friends). Armed with her diploma in Multimedia and a great zest for design and creativity, Nataliette spent her day time working as a designer, convinced that she belonged in the industry she loved.

In mid 2008, a mere two years down the road, reality took a chokehold on her enthusiasm — the blatant disrespect of the design profession. Her grandmother passed away an anguished cripple. She impulsively quit her job to take a year off. With her sudden freedom, she happily pursued her love for art and illustration, drawing out random stories living in her head.

Nataliette was invited to hold her very own solo show for a month in September of 2009. She sold half her works. Enjoyed what she thought was an easy and comfortable but hardly decadent art career. Yet despite enduring a precarious income with graphic design on the side, continuing her art pursuits was hardly sustainable. Increased reclusiveness due to poverty meant the muse soon ran out of material.

Consequently, after enduring exactly 365 days since she quit her agency job, she returned to the design profession for a stable income, to the delight and relief of her parents who were dependant on her monetary contributions to the family.

Nataliette is currently working as a designer and drawing in her free time.

Artist Statement

Nataliette enjoys telling the world her life’s little stories in her art.

They are re-interpreted selected instances of my exceedingly normal life, no matter how big or small. Despite being selfish in nature, the apparent situations of my illustrations become easily identifiable with anyone: the next door neighbour we never speak to, the stranger we pass by, the acquaintance we lost touch with.

Often Nataliette’s subjects are in situations where she has personally experienced, as she believes that the ultimate uniformness of the human race (in gratitude of our continuously eroding cultural boundaries) will ensure the mutual empathy from a complete stranger regarding the person in her picture. She enjoys wordplay and synonyms, duality in words and meanings, but most importantly, the picture’s affinity with the viewer. Nataliette thoroughly resents abstractionism (or perhaps is just too dense to figure it out) and thinks art should be accessible and readable.

She creates religiously by the words of her most revered idol, Oscar Wilde: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim / The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography / It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”