Guest Artist: Joseph Cornelius, 18, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Joseph Cornelius, Steampunk Duo, 2024
My name is Joseph Cornelius, I’m an 18-year-old illustrator and history of art student at the Courtauld Institute in London. While my studies focus on the analysis of art and my hobbies in the creation of it, the two tend to help one another as knowing the creative process and materiality of creation assists the understanding of artists. Similarly, researching other visual artists and understanding their decisions helps my own inspirations and techniques.
I have been creating art for as long as I can remember, particularly for mini-projects such as board games, card games, comics, animations, and other mediums of art that I grew up with. My abundant exposure to the worlds of video game art and cartoons inevitably pushed me towards creating my own character-based illustrations. While fine arts appear to be far more respected within the “art world” because of its associations with emotion, expression and meaning, illustration to me represents an art form which connects the imagination (and what my younger self would refer to as “cool-looking ideas”) to technical skill. To some, this diminishes its importance, along with the often monetary aims of illustration. However, I believe illustration is immensely valuable for studying artistic methods and style. While verbal stories are a big part of our enjoyment of books and comics, the illustrations of William Blake, Beatrix Potter, Manga artist Eiichiro Oda, and countless other illustrators are a huge reason for their appeal. While I have experimented with, and will continue to experiment with, fine arts, even then I think of my 13-year-old-self and whether he would have gained excitement just through looking at the work. My favourite comments tend to be from younger audiences being “inspired” by my art. This is extremely fulfilling considering how I was similarly inspired by illustrative work.
I primarily use watercolour and fine liner ink pens. My process follows a similar route to most other traditional illustrators: pencil sketch, colour in layers, then inking. My pieces tend to lean on the maximalist side which often means they are quite time-consuming; however the feeling of finishing an artwork always makes up for it.
In the two pieces shown in this article, my inspiration of combining pieces of media can be seen. The first takes aesthetics from Alice in Wonderland, Beetlejuice, as well as the song and music video “Caterpillar Girl” by the Cure. I also pick small symbols such as mushrooms, leaves, or butterflies which I can repeat throughout an artwork and also use to construct composition. For example, the twisting vines and the spiralling butterflies draw our eyes to the large central figure. I also use the character seen in the bottom left throughout my work sometimes to suggest a kind of discovery about the artwork as if we are the naive girl wandering through the illustrations.
Joseph Cornelius, Butterfly Garden, 2023
The second work was made directly after my viewing of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky. You can see this in the steampunk machines and mechanisms which clog up the background. Again, symbols like airships and clouds are horizontally layered to add to the complicated sky-city behind the two characters.
I encourage everyone to engage in creating art. If the meaningfulness of “fine art” seems daunting, the sketches and doodles we leave on scraps of paper or finger-drawings we smudge across steamed-up-glass are still part of that cyclical process of inspiration and creativity, the same stimulating mechanism through which I create all of my work.