Interview Cel Castellá : The Art of Being You

In 2018, artist Celeste Castellá left Buenos Aires to settle in Paris, where she has turned her passion for art into a full-time career. Today, Cel works as a freelance illustrator, although painting and embroidery are also part of her creations.

In this interview, we explore the process of building a healthy relationship with creativity and the importance of making art an authentic and personal expression.

Ayhuma : Where does your connection with drawing come from?

Celeste : Since I was very little, it was like my refuge. I was always very shy, and I feel that drawing was the place where I felt comfortable, and I think I knew from a very young age that I was good at it.

But when the time came to decide on a career, it never would have occurred to me to become an illustrator, because it wasn’t really a career people talked about in Argentina.

Ayhuma : And at what point, then, did you decide you wanted to turn this passion into your work?

Celeste : I had been flirting with the idea from a distance ever since I moved here (Paris), but always with a lot of fear and embarrassment. I would post 20 embroideries and a small drawing here and there.

Then during the pandemic, I dared to share more drawings. I felt like my Instagram became, at that moment, a bit of a diary of what I was experiencing, and it was like a shared exploration of so many things.

Ayhuma : And what was your relationship with social media like at that time?

Celeste : When the pandemic ended and life resumed, I didn’t know how to deal with all those people. You see influencers or people who make art and share it, and you think: well, I should do that because this person does it and they’re successful.

So, until you find your own way of connecting with your audience, a lot of time goes by. Nowadays, I feel like I have phases where I share a lot and others where I share nothing, and that used to torment me. Today, I experience it in a much more natural way.

Ayhuma : Your illustrations are marked by everyday scenes and vibrant colors. What was your journey like to arrive at your current style?

Celeste : When I used to draw as a hobby, I followed trends and was really into Tumblr. So, I tried to emulate the styles I saw. But what always amused me was observing real-life situations interpreted through drawing.

I feel there’s a lot of beauty in the everyday. At one point, I felt a strong urge to illustrate a scene from a photo I had taken in Japan — it was a street in Tokyo filled with billboard signs and a few people walking. I think that’s when I started exploring more random situations.

Ayhuma : Another aspect of your work that has always caught my attention is your way of illustrating bodies in a more fluid and less standardized way. Is there a political intention behind drawing bodies this way?

Celeste : There are moments when one of the things I enjoy most technically is drawing people in positions that aren’t easy to capture. It’s something that challenges me and entertains me.

So, there’s a technical search for forms, but yes, there’s a very political element in the drawings, in this quest to break away from the hegemony of bodies, colors, and ethnicities.

It’s about showing people whose gender is open to interpretation or drawing people with different abilities — which I’ve done very few times, and I know I should do more of in my drawings. But for now, I enjoy this thing, this wink, where they appear in situations as normal as the ones I draw, things that should be more normalized but perhaps aren’t.

Ayhuma : I think that’s perfect! And representativity helps us look at ourselves with more love and feel part of a community. I imagine that the travels you take also help you think about other worlds, right? I saw the illustrations you made after your vacation in Greece, and I was thinking about how travel nourishes your creativity.

Celeste : I’m very curious and suffer a lot from FOMO, and I feel that moving around and constantly discovering new things feeds me a lot creatively. At first, I thought there was a more linear path because I’d see other illustrators traveling with their sketchbooks, drawing what they saw, and I would get frustrated because I couldn’t do that.

I’d take my sketchbook and come back angry because I hadn’t done anything. Then I realized that there’s nothing I enjoy more than being in a place I don’t know and seeing all those new things I’ve never experienced.

I come back recharged with energy, and it’s those pauses that I feel are so necessary to boost your creativity. Afterward, I feel like drawing again and I miss it. Sometimes it’s really nice to miss drawing, which sometimes I don’t even do with the daily routine. Obviously, creativity requires a lot of work, but it also requires many pauses, letting the information settle, and giving yourself the space to rest.

Ayhuma : And what would a healthy relationship with your creativity look like for you?

Celeste : It’s something I work on a lot in therapy, and I feel that nowadays I have moments when I have a healthy relationship with it and days when I don’t as much.

I think a healthy relationship with creativity is, first, understanding yourself, because knowing yourself takes you to a place of authenticity and not wanting to be someone else. 

In art, it’s very easy to want to satisfy the needs of others because you’re giving your art to other people.

Ayhuma : That’s powerful, I’ve never seen it that way. What you say makes total sense.

Celeste : It’s very easy to fall into things that might not belong to you as much. That’s why, first, you have to really get to know yourself, understand what spaces you inhabit, what things you like, and what makes you feel comfortable and happy doing. I think that’s the foundation of everything.

There’s a phrase my therapist told me that I have stuck in my head like a post-it, and it won’t go away. At one point, I was conflicted with my style and a particular project, and he told me to give myself space to enjoy making art for the sake of making art, something I don’t always do.

I think when we’re artists who work partly on personal projects and partly in more commercial areas, where we have to respect a brief, we always need to return to what we enjoy, what we like, so that what you’re telling is something you want to tell and not something the other person expects you to tell, right?

Ayhuma : I think this is a place we all go through: trying to achieve the balance between what we want to create, alongside all the external demands. In this idea of being true to your own creative universe, what advice would you give to someone reading this who wants to start an artistic career?

Celeste : I think the era of hypercommunication we live in today — where we’re constantly exposed to so many references and seeing amazing artists all the time — ends up generating a lot of anxiety about being able to reach, from one day to the next, the level of the artist we admire.

I feel that at the beginning I felt a lot of that anxiety, like, okay, I want to be great already, and, of course, it wasn’t going to happen that way. I feel that the Celeste from four years ago wanted to be the person I am today, but in two days, and that’s impossible. And I feel like art has a lot to do with doing, with sitting down and doing, doing, exploring.

Ayhuma : Of course, the thing is, on social media, people are always posting the best photos of their creations. You see all of that, and it’s easy to forget that other artists also make works they don’t like or that don’t look great.

Celeste : And you’re going to make horrible things a million and a half times, and that’s fine, it’s normal. But sometimes you don’t realize that the horrible thing you made, you’ll look at it three years later and maybe you redo it. You give it new meaning, but conceptually, it’s amazing. So everything is redeemable, and it’s great that the process happens, because without the process, you’re not going to get to where you want to be. And there are no shortcuts to this.

Ayhuma : Of course, it’s like you said before: art is a continuous exploration.

Celeste : Yes, and maybe in 10 years, I’ll look at something that today makes me very proud and say, "Wow, what a mess." But it doesn’t matter, it’s awesome because it represents me as I am today.

There’s something Mariana Enríquez once said about her first novel, which became super famous. She wrote it when she was, I think, 18 years old. And she says that today, as a 50-year-old woman, every time she reissues it, she’s very tempted to rewrite it and improve it. Because, she says, it’s her most-read novel, so obviously, she wants her most-read novel to be her best work today.

And she says that when that thought crosses her mind, she then realizes that the novel speaks to a moment in her life; it’s like a snapshot of who she was at that time, an artistic photo of who she was back then.

And it’s beautiful in that way. And that’s when she lets go of all control and lets it be as it is. I think it’s a very beautiful way to understand oneself as an artist in every moment of artistic growth.

Ayhuma : I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, thinking that everything we do has to be perfect, and we forget about that — the process. Because sometimes you make a drawing that maybe you don’t like that much, that you think is ugly, but you were experimenting with new colors, training your hand, letting go of your pressures, and then you transfer it to the canvas, and that’s it. You created something, and that’s gold.

Celeste : Yes, and also, what’s ugly or what’s beautiful is subjective. And as long as what you’re doing communicates and reaches the other person, that’s enough. But for that, you have to do.

And sometimes the pursuit of perfection makes us stop creating and get paralyzed, leaving us with the frustration of "oh, no, I’m not that kind of artist, I’ll never be like that artist," and then we end up doing nothing.

What’s important is doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. There will be many days of frustration, when you don’t like what you’re doing, when it’s not what you were looking for, but there will be a day when you do something and say, "oh wait, what I did today is good, I’m proud of this."

And that’s the starting point where you need to gather all those little things to keep growing.