Illustrator Rhea Mack’s characters, “weirdos,” as she calls them, exist in their sherbet-colored world, standing as if posing for photos in whimsical outfits, hand in hand or with arms flung over one another’s shoulders. She tells Alix-Rose Cowie how an album of inherited family photos inspired her to create a new set of family and friends in her drawings: a bunch of colorful misfits she wishes she knew for real.
Rhea Mack draws on Sundays. The hours that bring one week to a close and anticipate the beginning of another belong to her illustration practice, away from family, friends and her full-time job as a social worker. During the week, a pattern, a color or the piece of an image might flash in Mack’s mind. “It kind of burns in my brain and then I’m able to tap into that on my Sunday,” she says. She starts in the quiet of the morning, at a window in her home in Massachusetts, where she can watch birds eating the feed she’s left out for them. “I’m a Pigeon Lady,” she says, bringing to mind the eccentric character from “Home Alone 2” or perhaps “Mary Poppins” depending on your generation. “They’re not actually pigeons, but I enjoy caring for the birds outside. Staring at them while they eat relaxes my brain and allows me to go into my other worlds.”
These colorful pencil-drawn worlds are inhabited by a peculiar cast of spirit guides, skeletons, oddballs, rolling heads, wizards, performers and anthropomorphic moons and shooting stars. In short, they’re the weirdos she wishes she knew. “I feel like they just kind of grow as I’m drawing,” she says. “I start to feel like I can see this person and understand them, and I have so much affection for them once they’ve been drawn.” She loves drawing twins or couples; two people who share an unknowable bond or untranslatable language between them. In pairs or groups, Mack’s misfits are often gathered and posing as if for a photo—an arm awkwardly slung over another’s shoulders. She wonders if this might have snuck in from her early references, an album of inherited family photos.
It’s a goal to be as strange as possible just because it’s really enjoyable. My hope anyway is that I don’t limit myself
It was once she’d worked through these family photographs that Mack felt inspired to make up her own people: a sort of magical chosen family of ghosts and kooks. Her work got progressively curious as she gave herself permission to welcome whoever was waiting to tumble out the tip of her pencils, while challenging herself not to repeat characters, settings or situations. “It’s taken a bit of time, but with each drawing I feel more confident in what I can draw and closer to what I want to express,” she says. Posting her illustrations publicly, Mack sometimes feels insecure about what others might think. “Although honestly, it’s a goal to be as strange as possible just because it’s really enjoyable,” she says. “My hope anyway is that I don’t limit myself.”
Even when doing a self-portrait, Mack’s work elicits other dimensions. In a recent picture, her bare face—framed by cropped auburn hair—takes up most of the space. “I have a giant head, and I have unmanageable hair sometimes, but it’s just what you get,” she says. To one side is another figure dressed in a flamboyant full-length striped bodysuit, with orange hair, and pointy fingernails—an alter ego, or an apparition of another Rhea. “I feel like for all of us, we are who we are for better or worse, and then we have an aspirational version of ourselves,” she says. This could be a figment of who we once were, who we always planned to be, or even a current self if we could wear anything in the world, and had more time to get dressed.
Mack’s beings wear elaborate cloaks embellished with eyes, thumb hats, starry capes with fringed epaulettes, folktale garb, pantaloons, hexagon spectacles and many, many things in stripes. “I really like stripes,” she says. “I love the way that they look; there’s a whimsy to it. It’s a way to make something like a pair of pants more interesting. So I find myself doing stripes on everybody.” And everybody—whether they have three faces, extra arms, or are wearing their ribcage on the outside—is drawn in happy, sherbet colors (her pencils that need replacing most often are Blush Pink and Lime Peel Green.) Whether she’d wear them or not, Mack wishes all the clothes she imagines really existed. “I dress really boring,” she says. “If people saw me, they would be really disappointed in my outfits!” A clothing line for the stripy lady in her self-portrait, then.
Many of the people (or entities) that Mack draws have two pairs of eyes. “It gives them a second way of looking at the world, almost like putting special lenses on,” she explains. The extra set allows them to see things they wouldn’t usually, revealing previously invisible realms. “I adore supernatural and fantasy worlds with ghosts, werewolves and monster-y kind of things. I don’t feel they are a threat; they’re all just a part of the landscape and are just as valid there as anyone else.” Gathering them together in her work is her appeal for more strangeness: “I just want to meet more weirdos.”