Interview with Natalee Miller

All right, so, first off, who is The Woman? And how did she come to be?

Who is the woman? Well, she's like an archetype for me. My friend and I came up with her in Miami. Miami just requires like a certain level of confidence that I felt like we had to step into, and we just brainstormed her. She kind of came to be because we were acting a little different in Miami. We were catching each other being a little bitchier and sassier. Probably a little more real honestly. It's funny how we become The Woman in Miami, everybody kind of becomes The Woman in Miami.

Then I decided I want to be The Woman, even when I'm not in Miami. So the way that I use artwork usually is I subconsciously draw my aspirations into reality.

So I just became obsessed with The Woman. And I've always wanted to be The Woman since I was a little girl. I never really thought about it, but she's like my adult Barbie. We can project ourselves onto her and vice versa.

It’s kind of funny because I never draw men, I only draw women anyway, but she’s different. Shes got daddy energy.

Before The Woman came to be, you found out you were a carrier of the brca gene putting you at a very high risk to develop breast and ovarian cancer, and that you’ll need 2 major preventative surgeries. The breast and ovaries are so intertwined with womanhood and femininity, how has this diagnosis influenced your work, and does it relate to The Woman? 

I think The Woman has arrived in perfect time for this diagnosis, actually. It seems silly, and it is to a degree, she’s just a character, but I think The Woman is being developed in real time as I deal with this. Like “This is she” when the hospital calls. It’s just funny to hear myself say that, who is this business lady speaking through me?  In the past I would have avoided the conversation entirely. It’s not groundbreaking but it is for me personally. 

“What Would The Woman Do?”

I’ve been really shy for a lot of my life and I don’t have time for that anymore. I have to step up and advocate for myself, and so I illustrate this feeling. It has to be expressed somewhere. 

This is all new for me, and its helping to put a face to it. Consciously working with the concept of grown ass womanhood and not girlhood or even young womanhood feels right for this moment, even if it’s just a fun character. 

I’ve been grieving my body, my perception of womanhood. Ironically, losing my ovaries and breasts is kind of a gateway into my actual womanhood. I have to sacrifice these things to save my life and I have to really step into a new role to do it. When I was younger, I felt like I didn’t have agency a lot of the time. Now I’m the same age as my mom when she was diagnosed with cancer, and I have a choice that she didn’t have. 

I guess she gives some levity to the whole thing. But whether it’s “The Woman” or just the women I draw, they’re all expressions of what’s up in my life.

So, what makes The Woman, The Woman?

She’s confident, she’s is very self assured. She's doesn't want to be a girl. She wants to be a woman, that's probably the main thing. I subconsciously considered myself as a girl up until I was like 40 years old, so she’s just like, very aspirational.

She’s solid, she's grounded, sassy. She commands the room. She gets a lot of attention, but doesn't need a lot of attention. She's also really stylish. Like she’s wearing shoulder pads at the gym somehow. She made her money and she’s got lots to spend. And very nostalgic, she's like a cool woman, as seen through the eyes of a girl growing up in the 80s and 90s.

Speaking of nostalgia, do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong decade?

Maybe a little bit because I would have really liked to be in my mid twenties at  the turn of the 70s and 80s.

I didn't really have peers around me growing up. It was all my mom's friends, my aunts. So that's the age group that I was surrounded by when I was young, women that were 30 to 40 through the 80s and early 90s.

So that was what an adult  looked like to me. And I didn't really have any girls around, so I didn't want to be a cool older girl. I wanted to be a hot auntie type.

I'm glad I got to observe that time period at a formative age because I think it was cool to absorb the style when I was like a little sponge. I think that the early 80s were the best for style and aesthetics. And I'm really lucky that I got to see art in the style of that time and the pop culture, it means a lot to me, so I probably wouldn't change it if I could.

Can you describe your influences?

My mom was very much The Woman. My mom, her friends, and her crew were all The Woman. They were hairstylists, so I grew up in their hair salon. Obviously, you can see that all over my art. I think a lot of it was that I was really supported as a young artist by my family. 

And also that was like this time when Nagels were really popular. Hair and nail salon art was like its own big thing. So I get a lot of comparisons to Patrick Nagel which annoys me at this point, but I can also so obviously see it. He was so popular when I was growing up, that style of art was probably the first that I noticed. He probably was the founder of The Woman. I’ll give credit where it’s due [laughs].

So I grew up in a hair salon surrounded by all my mom and all her friends and my two older brothers. So it was just like me, a little kid with all these cool women who were smoking cigarettes, drinking tab, taking diet pills probably, cutting hair, listening to music.

And then my brothers who were like very popular older football players – and I was not cool. They would let me hang with them and they were constantly watching MTV. So I was kinda raised on early MTV, it was my child care basically. And pop culture was crazy then. So that had a big impact. 

I think that one of the hugest influences for me was the A-ha Take On Me video, I remember the moment when I first saw it so clearly. I still watch it sometimes, and I get tears in my eyes. I can remember being like, I want this feeling, to be able to sketch out these dramatic stories in my head like this and bring it to life- I can't even explain it, that's just what I wanted my life to look like, I remember being fascinated by the animation and wanting to be a part of making that, even as a very young kid.  That video was perfect to me.  And very much influenced the style of drawing that I use.

So is music a big part of your process? Are you always listening to music? What's the ambiance when you're working?

Yes, I have to listen to music. I can't listen to podcasts or audio books. And often, depending on what I'm working on, I have to listen to music that's not in English, because I can't get caught up in the words really, I have to just have the music. But I'll usually match the ambiance to the vibe of whatever I'm drawing.

It just envelopes me, and I kind of go into a trance when I'm drawing. So I can't just play something just because I happen to like it, and be working on something with a very strong point of view and artistic style. It has to match, have to make it a fully immersive experience.

It's kind of pretentious [laughs] but it is what it is. It’s not by choice.  I have like thousands of playlists and I have a few styles that I can go between. I know what music will take me to where I need to go mentally to draw what I need to draw.

For The Woman, I always listened to Laura Branigan’s “Self Control.” I think that's like the most The Woman song. But there's so many, there's so many. It's probably all music from the hair salon.

What does a typical day look like for you?

Lately, I've been trying to really reel myself in because I'm trying to embody The Woman, so I'm trying to control myself a little more.

I wake up, I have to have a schedule, like my brain is too scattered to just go willy-nilly into the day and The Woman wouldn't do that anyway. The Woman –

– is booked and busy –

Yeah she’s booked and busy [laughs].

And so I wake up, I have breakfast and meditate, I do my morning pages (from The Artists Way) every single day. It's always the same, even if it's the same 3 page brain dump every day, it's so monotonous but I have to do it. 

And then I just go into my studio. Depending on what I'm working on at the time, I put on the appropriate music, and sometimes I even have to put on like the right outfit, and seriously get into the role of whatever I’m making. Because it's not just drawing for me. It's a whole act I have to do for nobody but myself. [laughs] Sometimes I don't even leave my house. And once I start drawing, the whole day goes by, like, I don't even know what happens to that time. I couldn't tell you, and then I just go to the gym, make dinner, talk on the phone. 

I love that everything's very like curated. You live it.

It's so annoying – it's actually embarrassing to say out loud, because it’s not like I’m trying to put something on. But I actually can't get my work done unless I completely immerse myself in the experience of whatever I'm trying to draw.

It's interesting, because you actually live that because you have to, but I feel like there are a lot of influencers who do that for the feed, and are very much just “putting it on.”

Yeah, I know, it's sort of opposite in the way. I’m like I could share this.  And this is I guess what people do now?  But it's actually kind of embarrassing to me [laughs] like I’m embarrassed to share that.

What do you do if you ever find yourself in a creative rut? Do you ever find yourself in a creative rut?

All the time, and they last long periods of time, and it's really, really painful. I have an existential crisis every time. I have to really take care of myself.

And I hate to say it, but I usually get into creative ruts when I'm in a relationship, or I'm doing anything that requires me to share large chunks of my emotional and mental space with somebody else.

I'm a good friend, I have space set aside for that, friends and family. But I've never really been great at making healthy space for another person, because art is really my true love. That's my number one relationship so I don't know how to share that space with another person and usually when I do, inspiration dries up, and it's really hard to get it back.

So it takes me a long time, I have to get really introspective, kind of selfish. I usually have to travel. I have to kind of jumpstart my consciousness in a way, and my focus. But it takes a long time to get back. It sucks.

But sometimes, I don't even know how to do it. It gradually comes back in. But I don't have much control over that, and it's really hard.

Speaking of traveling, describe your dream vacation if you had an unlimited budget

The dream vacation. I don't even know how to go on vacation, first of all, I don't know how to like chill out. Just chill.

It doesn’t have to be chill, it could be a trip.

Okay, so a trip is different, I'd probably go back to Armenia. If borders were also no issue, I would probably travel all through the Caucuses. I’d to Georgia (the country)

Um, I probably go back to Budapest. I would honestly probably go to lots of cities, I know that's like not that cool of an answer. But I feel so electrified in cities. I would love to see Tokyo.

But honestly, I probably wouldn't plan much. I like to arrive not knowing too much, not much of a structure. I also really like to be impulsive and book a trip to somewhere when I’m already traveling. Like, I can't really afford this detour, but I'm gonna go anyway. I like to feel like my life might fall apart and I might not make it back home [laughs]. I’d just see where the wind would take me. I can say that laughing now but its actually been terrifying at times, in retrospect. 

How did you learn to draw?

I don't know, I think I was always just drawing. My mom was very supportive of me. Because I was like the only kid in my family, I was either bored or overstimulated at all times. So I would just go draw, and that was just kind of my thing that I would do to calm my thoughts.

I don't really know how I learned how to draw though, I just remember kind of doing it. I remember doing it before I could even talk really, on like any surface that I could find. My mom saved everything I drew, so I never felt like it was like a waste of time. It felt like something I was supposed to be doing and like a special gift from very, very early on.

Because of that I also just thought I was supposed to be an artist ever since I was a little kid. And I just practiced so much, not even for skill, just as an outlet. I was a pretty overwhelmed child, so it was just like my happy place.

Was your family creative?

On my mom's side, yeah. A couple of my uncle's had crazy artistic talent, and my mom was really creative. But there wasn't a lot of space for them to explore that. I think people just had to go to work. And every once in a while somebody would pull out a picture and be like, ‘Oh my god, Uncle Pete drew that, that's crazy.’ But then we wouldn’t see anything else for like 10 more years.

If you had, if you had to give a piece of advice to an artist just starting out, what would it be?

Like a working artist that’s starting out? Or someone that's developing their style?

Let's do developing style.

Okay. Um, I think about this a lot, actually. What would my advice be? To not judge the way that you see things, and observe everything, whatever you're interested in. I love drawing faces and drawing fashion. When I’m looking at someone I notice the shadows falling on their bone structure or light on their eyelashes or whatever. I'm like, this is so beautiful and interesting and I want to figure out how to draw this. Don’t judge your own eye too much or let people tell you it’s wrong to see things the way that you do. All those little details inform your style. So I would just say, be as obsessively observant about what interests you because it is imprinting in your brain constantly. And developing your style isn't just like practicing physically, it's also what you take in for information. 

And just be more immersive, like, do what I do [laughs]. If you're trying to capture something from the 70s, watch 70s movies, listen to 70s music. It really does kind of program you. Just let yourself go crazy in there, and don’t feel bad about it. Its cool to be that extra it’s cool to figure out who you are.

Who are your favorite artists dead or alive?

Dead or alive? I'm actually really bad with art history, I don't really know much. It’s embarassing and also my memory for names kind of sucks.

Definitely Antonio Lopez and Pater Sato. Definitely Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Masters of capturing a mannerism. But as for general style, I realized that I'm very influenced by Japanese illustrators from the 70s and 80s, Kuni Fukai and Akira Uno, so many others. Which is interesting because I don't really know where I picked that up. I don't know where I saw that as a kid, I wasn't really into like anime or anything. I couldn't name a lot of them. But I’m more influenced by styles than artists specifically I think. Egyptian movie posters, Eastern European design from the 80s. I wish I knew all the artists by name, its all over the place. 

But not just illustrators and painters, I'm really inspired by Halston the fashion designer, and Elsa Peretti, even though not I'm not a fashion designer, and I'm not a jeweler. But their way of moving lines, and seeing how things flow, their stories.  The lives people lead, that really intrigues me and I'd say that's just as influential.

Do you want to expand on fashion at all?

I have so many memories of fashion media that I consumed as a kid. House of Style with Cindy Crawford, perfume ads, makeup commercials. Ck One- that campaign changed my brain chemistry for better or worse. I have a log of fashion and beauty content that I was absorbing so heavily. The opening credits for this show Fashion File on E! is stuck in my head forever. It was these very glamorous runway scenes and 90s supermodels set to “Obsession” by Animotion. All veryThe Woman. 

I use editorial poses as references, and I think I even kind of move like that in my own body now because it's just, it was so influential, I didn't have anything else to look to, and because I wanted to be an adult so bad, and to be able to like hang with the girls. I was like, hey, if I know how to speak this language, and I know what I'm talking about, I'll be able to hang. So I was like, kind of ingesting that media and culture as a little kid trying to be The Woman from like, age five. [laughs].

Do you pull all this from your memory? Or do you actually have these physical magazines now from 70s and 80s?

I have some, I find them sometimes at thrift stores and stuff. And obviously the internet is like a huge archive, so I know what to look for, which is cool. But I have like millions of visual memories floating in my head all the time.

A couple years ago, I went through a huge phase where I was hunting down a lot of perfumes and ads from the 90s – like Giorgio, which is what my mom wore, and started pulling visuals from that whole thing. I love the drama of a perfume commercial so much. Navy by Cover Girl specifically. I’m sure it smells terrible but I needed to be the woman in those commercials. 

I also was drinking a lot of Tab and collecting those ads a few years ago and that became a whole thing. It’s discontinued now which was devastating.

It's all attached to sensory stuff. Like I'll hear a sound or smell a scent and it will unlock a memory that then becomes a huge hyperfixation in my art for like 6 months. I got a perfume recently that’s supposed to smell like snow but it smells like my moms old purse to me. Like leather and cash and doublemint gum. So im sure that discovery will end up in my work somewhere. Everything's triggered by smells and tastes and sounds.

What's your dream dinner party guest list?

Oh my god there's so many people I want there. I want Naomi Campbell there. Because she's such a bitch and I love it. She's very The Woman. Side note– whenever I'm feeling like I need to invoke the woman and stand up for myself, I watch video compilations of Naomi Campbell bitching people out. I'm like, that's how you do it, That's how you do it [laughs].

Okay, so Naomi Campbell. Elsa Peretti. Siouxsie sioux. Candy Darling. 

I want Eartha Kitt at the head of the table, and Cher for sure. Sade Adu.

Um. I don't really want any men there. I don't want to talk to men. Except like, okay, Kevyn Aucoin. Actually, I do want him there. 

What does “this is she” mean? [referring to her “this is she” tee] 

Oh my god, I had this moment yesterday. I had to take an important call and I was nervous about my tone not sounding confident and blurted it “This is She” in this very Joan Collins way. I was like “damn, ok so this is she is how The Woman answers the phone.” And she's always on the phone. She's taking calls! 

Do you have a favorite project that you've ever worked on? 

I would say the Amenti Oracle was one of two major ones. That changed my life- literally changed the course of my life. That's how I got to become an artist full-time.

In 2021, I got to go to Armenia. A group of artists worked on a compilation called Yeraz to raise money and awareness for the war in Artsakh. I did the cover artwork, and being included in that project alone was really meaningful. I also painted a mural in Yerevan while I was there, so that was definitely huge for me. Going to Armenia was my #1 goal in life since i was a kid and I had kind of given up on the dream so that was definitely one of the most meaningful. To be there under those circumstances was both a huge honor and really heartbreaking. I don’t know if I can top that one. 

I love a lot of the work I've done, so I'm really lucky to be able to say that. Some of them are just little commissions that I didn't even necessarily share with the world, but they were so perfect.

Do you have any upcoming projects you’re excited about?

Yes! My friend Jennifer Sodini and I are working on our third oracle deck together and its a magical collaborative process, as it always is with her. She’s incredible. She's a brilliant scholar of multiple esoteric schools, and definitely a creative soulmate.  It’s called Be Not Afraid and it’s inspired by the biblically accurate angels. Artistically, its got elements of 80’s animation that we grew up on,  Belladonna Of Sadness, The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit.