Ana Terral’s illustrations perfectly capture pain – from heel blisters and sun burns to bite marks

Moldovan-born visual artist and illustrator Ana Terral understands your pain. Chapped lips, blisters on the back of heels, bite marks, pin-pricks, sun-burns (and those annoying tan lines). Using alcohol markers on very thin, slightly beige paper, her pink palettes look soft and watery, a delicate mix between felt-tip on wet paper and the ethereality of watercolours soaking into paper grains. Ana’s work circles themes of identity, desire and memory – and it led her away from editorial illustrations into fashion illustrations, where reflections on fashion opened the way to her current art, including a project called Surface Memory, all about marks, scratches and damage that our skin remembers.

Ana says she hardly uses an eraser, which makes her work feel even more careful. Drawn to temporality and the fragility of the body, Ana explores traces left behind by objects of desire – indeed, fashion hurts. We’ve all endured a heel blister that bleeds through the sock, but we never stop wearing the shoe. Ana’s paintings, in their deceptively simple colours but uncomplicated compositions, recall Mark Rothko, in the lovely way that bleeding occurs not just within her subjects but within the alcohol markers themselves. Her subjects aren’t just drawings of body parts, but body parts with blood coursing through them, rising to pain, ready to burst, creating an exquisite tension between pain and beauty.