Chiara Bautista is an illustrator and graphic artist based out of Tucson, Arizona. By day, she is an illustrator for the Arizona Daily Star; but by night she goes by Milk, producing her own beautifully tragic illustrations.
Her work is recognizable based off of her graceful lines and soft color palette, but more notably from her characters and narrative content. Chiara pulls from a plethora of imagery references, from religious iconography and Lucha libre masks (a nod to her Mexican heritage), to music references (lyrics and titles to songs that have had an impact in her life). Many icons and symbols as well as a variety of other characters populate her work, including birds, bears, skeletal characters, tentacles, keys, ribbons, the wolf and the rabbit, and the huntress, to name a few.
Chiara’s illustrations are both beautiful and tragic, each telling its own story about love, longing, heartbreak, and betrayal, all with a fairytale twist. One of the more spellbinding things about her art is that a good deal of her imagery references stories told between Chiara and her muse, Ilka. These two have never met in person, but have held an online relationship for years. One can only assume that these visual tales of tragic romance amongst the characters pertain to Chiara and Ilka.
A quote from the artist: “As for my personal work, I create the illustrations in order to work as part of a small conversation and use them to express something I can’t find the right words for. After more than a decade of condensing big amounts of text into single images on a daily basis, I find using visual communication as normal as any other language. We can say things through music, words and actions. I’m one of those who like to say it using figures and colors.”
