Pauline Mauruschat creates watercolour murals for motherhood and loneliness

The painter Pauline Mauruschat takes watercolour to another level. Finding strengths in the nature of the medium – the bleed and spread of paint on certain canvases – Pauline creates enchanting textures that accentuate her mural-esque illustrations of flying horses, demonic dogs and double-sided tigers. Unsparing with detail, Pauline floods her canvases with combinations of paint and coloured pencil, using the former’s bleeding tendrils to creating blooming flowers and glowing stars, to the latter’s harsher edges and thick colouring. Although she takes considerable inspiration from her daughters, Pauline is transparent about art as an act of catharsis. “I love to draw animals, people and plants and the connection between them,” says Pauline. “It gives me a sense of connection to the world, in which I sometimes feel quite lonely.”

Nature, ornaments and patterns are a motif in Pauline’s work, they are acts of meditation in their swirling complexions, or as Pauline puts it: “A reason not to think for once.” The unpredictability of water lends itself perfectly to these works, which render common images seen in design with luminosity and delicate transparency. Scenes of animal violence or harmony between humans and nature feel vulnerable under Pauline’s eye for composition, allowing the fragility of watercolour to side with the oppressiveness of heavy crayons. “I think we are moving away more and more from our origin, with social media and the way we live today,” says Pauline. “My belief is that what makes us happy is this original connection to the earth and the creatures living in it.”