Buenos Aires-born artist and illustrator Paula Castro has been making her mark with intricate line work and playful illustrations. After studying the University of Buenos Aires, she moved to Treviso, Italy, and then to Paris, France to further develop her career. She would go on to have work in numerous exhibitions in Italy, France, Spain, London, New York and Buenos Aires, and has had work comissioned for Hermes, Guardian Music, Vogue, Universal Music, Issey Miyake, Rolling Stone Magazine, Saatchi & Saatchi, Here Design and Christian Dior. More recently, Castro illustrated the companion Fleabag: The Scriptures book to coincide with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit series.

We caught up with Castro after she illustrated a series of TikTok stars for Flaunt. Read below!

Where do you look to for inspiration when beginning work on a new piece?

Internet, old books, nature, cartoons, and music.

You currently live between Paris and Buenos Aires. What influence do each of these two cities have on your drawings?

I’m living in Buenos Aires at the moment. It’s a city of high contrasts (in every sense) and inevitably influences what I do. Also the artistic scene in Buenos Aires is very much inspiring.

Most of your work is in black and white, and has a very distinctive look. How did you develop your specific style of illustration?

Learning to draw on my own, making mistakes, and using those mistakes as personal tools.

You created the imagery for Phoebe Walter-Bridge’s Fleabag: The Scriptures book. How did this collaboration come about, and what was your process for transforming the show’s key moments into illustrations?

This collaboration came about thank’s to my agent, Olivia.

First of all, I had to see the show, as I didn’t know it before, and the great thing was that I loved it so much. The editors were very clear which specific illustrations they wanted for each chapter, and my work was to capture the right perspective and look for each of them, search through every chapter for those elements in different scales and views, and choose what would look great illustrated on a book scale… and finally draw!

What has been your favorite commissioned piece thus far? You’ve spoken about working at the intersection of illustration and fine art. Could you delve into the affordances of each, and the differences between the two? Is there any overlap?

As I mentioned before, I loved Phoebe Walter-Bridge’s Fleabag. Also, in this matter of intersections, this last year, I was commissioned by Argentina’s National Directorate of Museums and the National Directorate of Heritage Management to create a fanzine for kids. I created “OESUM” using my illustrations, which imagines the experience of visiting an upside-down museum.

This last experience is a good example where these two practices coexist and enhance each other.

Nowadays the barriers and prejudices between “high and low art” are fortunately blurring and this enables interesting things to happen.

I love this quote by Claudia del Río, the Argentinian artist:“Art is a desperate craft”

Paula Castro is represented by www.breedlondon.com