Colombia-based illustrator, known simply as Herikita, tends to her art while everyone else is sleeping. “I work at midnight like Cinderella’s mice, almost always, when everyone is sleeping and something pops up in my mind,” she writes on her website.
Her illustrations have, indeed, a dreamlike quality to them, full of animals and symbolism. “Always in my paintings there are codes in some way, animals that are really people,” said the illustrator in an interview withBooooooom. “Let’s say there is a painting of a woman telling a horse ‘this feeling is bigger than me’ the horse is my daughter before birth and I am the woman. There is never anything in my paintings that is not premeditated. I try to be as honest as I can with myself, sometimes others understand what they want and that is also fine.”
A common theme in her illustrations is women and femininity, explaining: “I have always spoken from my position as a woman, as a girl, as a teenager, as a mom. It is the most natural thing that comes out from me, it is what I know the most.”
According to Herikita: “all my life I have always painted women, maybe it is the figure that I’m more familiar with, but I remember I started painting women with big bodies and small heads because for me the inner child has always been there. It’s like a voice inside that is still intact. It’s like having a child’s head and an adult body. I like talking from my experience cause I believe is the most sincere thing, in my paintings, it’s all me.”
Take a look at some of her artwork below.
