Growing up, artist and illustrator Hayley Deti was “obsessed with documenting and preserving memory”. With her mother an “avid scrapbooker” and her father, a “sentimental collector”, her formative years very much developed her archival approach to illustration: “Their preciousness for life led me to become an avid diary keeper – collecting and glueing receipts, news clippings, notes from friends, pressed flowers, candy wrappers– things that served to remind me of the moment I was living. Although I still do this, as I got older I discovered how much I loved to draw, and felt that drawing was a more intimate and imaginative way to capture the moment,” the illustrator says.
For the artist then, every drawing or painting serves as a “memento of a memory or a feeling”, her subject matter reflecting her lived experiences and internal worlds. Whilst “simplistic” on the surface, her soft subjects – “goofy characters, dogs, creatures, and ordinary objects” – are all ways the artist has discovered “to mark the past and the present”.
Finding joy in the mark making, and “the tactile feeling of putting pen to paper”, Hayley often plays with a variety of mediums in her work, but finds herself returning to pen, ink, graphite, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint for her rich, colourful creatures. “Really, my practice centres around playing and self discovery. I love losing myself in a drawing,” the illustrator tells us.
When talking about the influences that feed into her vast collection of “goofy characters” (her many dog drawings being some of our favourites), Hayley shares that one major creative influence on her work is none other than the American animated franchise Looney Tunes. “I’ve always admired the artwork, the wacky characters and the way they contrast heavy material with outrageous humour,” she says. As a devoted collector with a sentimental heart, the artist also takes a lot of inspiration, of course, from all the treasures and trinkets that people like to collect – or what she calls all the things that “others find precious in life”.