Katie Ponder’s whimsical illustrations evoke art deco imagery with a modern twist — Muse Factory
By: Lera Nakshun
Tags: Digital, Illustration, Culture, Art, Creative

Written by Ilona Nakshun and Lera Nakshun

Ponder’s work was featured in Greek Myths, a recently-published anthology of ancient Greek stories by Jean Menzies.

Katie Ponder’s illustration of Pandora featured in Greek Myths by Jean Menzies. Image credit: Katie Ponder and Mendola Artists

London-based illustrator Katie Ponder’s artwork reimagines vintage imagery for modern audiences. Ponder’s work, with its lifelike contrasting textures and static posturing, is heavily influenced by art deco, theatre, and a taste for the gothic. Her characters, unmoving in their statuesque poses, seem frozen in time — furthering playing up the nostalgia of her old school theatre references. Despite the two-dimensional visuals that make up her artwork, Ponder is very much influenced by music and dance.

Members of The Royal Ballet in The Rite of Spring. Photo credit: © Dee Conway/ROH 2011 and The Royal Ballet

“As an art student, Stravinsky’s ballet Rite of Spring was a huge source of inspiration. I made a series of work based on it.” Ponder said in a statement to Muse Factory.

Although ballet often conjures up images of fluidity and grace, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is characterized by the abrupt and angular movements performed by its dancers. The Rite of Spring is an imaginative ballet centered on pre-Christian Slavic society during springtime. Originally choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancers are often seen holding steady, unchanging positions with their faces turned to the side, showing their profiles to the audience.

Below, the illustration Moon Beam Dancer demonstrates the way in which Ponder’s work mimics the same angular dance positions and also incorporates The Rite of Spring’s focus on the extension of the dancers’ hands and fingers.

Moon Beam Dancer by Katie Ponder. Image credit: Katie Ponder www.katieponderillustration.com

This type of posing is also found in work she created for YouTuber and author Jean Menzies’ Greek Myths, a new retelling of the original Greek Myths for children and young adults.

“Even now when considering body language for an illustration I like to imagine how a dancer would express a pose or a mood. I find ballet very inspiring.” Ponder told Muse Factory.

Whether it is an illustration of a Greek god, an animal, or a human, each figure in Ponder’s work is distinctly sharp. Each structure is made up of intersecting lines and clear contours. A lion’s claws, animals’ tails, and the waves of the sea are made up of lines that lead up to a point. Most of her characters are shown from the side, their arms at ninety-degree angles and fingers outstretched. In characters that are forward-facing, their faces are perfectly symmetrical, reminiscent of theatre puppets.

In many ways, Ponder’s illustrations are evocative of art as far back as ancient Egyptian wall paintings, where bodies are characteristically depicted from the side standing upright, static yet in motion.

“The banquet: fragments of wall painting” from the tomb of Nebamun, 1350 BC. Image credit: The British Museum

The similarities are seen even in Ponder’s rendering of hair, many hairstyles drawn as simple shapes until each strand is then separated from the other. In the image of The Banquet from the tomb of Nebanum, figures are shown sitting and standing, facing one of two opposite directions and arranged based on societal hierarchy. The arrangement of characters in space on a linear two-dimensional plane is also present in Ponder’s illustrations. The adornment of headdresses and jewelry in old Egyptian and Greek works are given a modern update in Ponder’s renderings.

There is also a kind of symmetry present in the ancient works that Ponder replicates. Ponder’s illustrations in Greek Myths follow a pattern of shapes and symmetry as well. The wreaths, helmets, and other headgear are made of simple shapes and clean lines. The temples’ columns and roofs are shaped like perfect triangles while the decorative borders on the edge of the pages are symmetrical.

A spread featuring the gods Ares and Athena from Menzies’ Greek Myths. Image credit: Katie Ponder and Amazon

Her work in Greek Myths is consistent with her style elsewhere. Even when depicting naturalistic forms like flora and fauna, Ponder creates a kind of synthetic symmetry that wouldn’t necessarily exist in reality. In Sunflower Pattern, the flowers have a softer shape to them and are missing the same sharpness that her other works have, and yet, the flowers are identical on each side. The leaves and stems follow the same design and seem to intersect in a way that wouldn’t be possible in the natural world. In Temperate House in Kew Gardens, the image consists of clean lines, squares, and rectangles building upon one another to create the structure. The building is entirely symmetrical which even in architecture is slightly jarring due to the lack of symmetry most of us are used to.

Most recently, Ponder participated in the 2020 TLC Deck of Cards Charity Art Auction, which sought to raise money for Transplant Links, a charity with a mission to teach kidney-transplant skills to medical workers in developing countries.