The French illustrator and comic artist draws motels, highways and skate parks at dusk, in watercolour and charcoal, and fills them with teenagers who have nowhere to be.
A woman lies on a motel bed in a white dress, eyes on the ceiling. Above her, a wall-mounted TV plays a black-and-white film, and a woman’s face fills the screen, lit and anxious. Outside the window, the sky has gone pink. This is Motel Blues, one of Louise Laborie’s illustrations. And it feels like the quiet, still moment in a film, just before the plot starts to take over.
Her pictures are cinematic and a little eerie. A pink car idles with its door open at a roadside strip of petrol signs, and its underside glows on the tarmac. A single house sits in an orange sunset, mirrored in the ground below it. In Clarksdale, a blue guitar hangs on a signpost where Highways 61 and 49 cross, and a red pickup’s headlights streak past low shopfronts. Skateboarders carve a concrete bowl under a row of pylons, and a figure in an orange hat sits beneath the curve of a bridge. Rarely does anything in these scenes happen too spontaneously or quickly.
Louise grew up in Nantes, a port city in western France, and set off for Paris at 18 to study art. She planned to become a photographer, but at the École des Arts Décoratifs, she drifted into drawing and printmaking and discovered screen printing, artist’s books and zine-making over five years. Her first illustrations appeared at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2018, and an exchange at Parsons School of Design in New York “changed my life”, she says. Both for the impact the city had on her and because it was there that she began to take “a real interest in comics”. Back in Paris, she wrote and drew a comic as her final-year project, and the French publisher Sarbacane released it in 2022. Since then she has worked for the press, taken part in artist residencies and, last year, held her first solo show, Highway 61, at Slow Galerie, followed by a second Sarbacane comic, Rock’n’roll Suicide.
Whatever she’s working on, her pictures always return to the same kinds of places. “I’m very inspired by transit spaces: stations, roads, airports… those in-between spaces that are neither quite the city nor quite the countryside,” she says. The people who live in them belong there. “They are neither quite children nor quite adults – they are teenagers wandering in the in-between worlds, unable to escape them.” When building these spaces, music is something she tunes into to drive her stories. “When I listen to music, words are created, and I imagine stories and films in which I would be the heroine.”
Louise sketches in coloured pencil first, then draws a detailed version of it, transferring it to thick watercolour paper, and paints in watercolour before adding charcoal and fixing the lot with spray. “I’m quite a perfectionist, and I like everything to be properly thought through before I start creating an image,” she says and explains the reasons why she plans each drawing very carefully. There is one particular step which is her favourite. “I love preparing my paper – wetting it and then stretching it over my board to stop it curling. It’s a little ritual that helps me treat the drawing I’m about to create as something special.” It doesn’t always go well, however. “I sometimes have to start several times again or realise in the end that the basic idea wasn’t strong or interesting enough.”
Her most beloved artworks of late are a pair of experiments, including Flou (“blur”), which she created while playing with light, flat colour and charcoal. In the scene, city lights blur into stars, and a dusk horizon is placed like a dark silhouette against the sky, car headlights smeared across the page. “I really like this hazy, very dark effect,” she says. After the precision of her comics, it “did me a world of good to be able to experiment with something freer and less constrained”.
The other series comes from a trip along the ‘Blues Highway’ from Chicago to New Orleans, which is where the Clarksdale crossroads and the red-floored stage of the Kingston Mines blues club in Chicago come from. “I like the idea of drawing on observations made along the way. And putting on paper things I’ve experienced or seen,” she says. “I’m never the main character in my drawings – well, perhaps in a way, but I’m always making up stories for myself.” The result is her own perception of reality, one that’s riddled with light, darkness, emotions and experiences – “even if, of course, it remains distorted by my fantasies and emotions”.
“I hope that my images can be a small light in the darkness,” she says. “That they bring a little hope and help us cope with the monotony, loneliness and sadness of everyday life.”
