FEELINGS

A U.K.–based mixed-media illustrator offers a pictorial representation of her experiences with stress, anxiety, and depression.

Thapp creates a character portrait of a woman whose emotions she charts through six seasons, inspired by the “calendar used by some countries in South Asia.” Her protagonist is a nameless professional artist whose life and inner world she depicts through hand-drawn and computer-rendered illustrations arranged in single units or in multiple-unit tiles. She employs few words to render this portrait, and those she does use serve as descriptive captions or clarifiers to tie together sequences of images. In the first section, "High Summer,” Thapp represents the narrator’s carefree emotional phase with warm-colored images and symbols of life (blooming flowers, butterflies). “Summer is good to me,” she writes. “I am powered by a thousand suns. Charged with confidence—a fickle friend that only comes out to play in the sun.” In “Late Summer,” the author reveals the hyperactivity of the previous season giving way to "a worry of not making the most" of opportunities. Here, the colors are brighter and harsher, and an inner voice awakens to torment the narrator with doubts, especially about her productivity as an artist. “Monsoon” brings grayer images and a narrator who is more lethargic and isolated. She charts her continued struggle with the voice of doubt, increasing moodiness, and the "blue light" of depression through autumn and winter, which Thapp represents with subdued colors and striking images drawn on black backgrounds. The narrator eventually emerges from her "cocoon" of loneliness in "Spring" and begins to gradually add “color back into my days.” Though narratively spare, the woman narrator and the subject matter she tackles—the cyclicality of emotion—work together to create an engaging personal story that, through subtle symbolism, makes for a rewarding reading experience.

A colorfully heartfelt evocation of thought and emotion.