Camille Rose Garcia's Dark and Disneyesque Snow White

Although I had seen Camille Rose Garcia's illustrations around in the past year or so she never really caught my attention until Amy Leigh Morgan blogged about her Snow White art and related book and show over at The Fairy Tale Factory back in February. She has, however, been around for a little while (since 2007) and has made a big impact in a short period of time. Her previous book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was a New York Times Bestseller.

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UPDATE: I took myself to the local bookstore for a rainy-day book browse yesterday and was delighted to find Garcia's Snow White there on the Myth & Folklore shelf. Although I had already written this post a while back and had browsed the illustrations and information about the book at length I had no idea the edition was so gorgeous. Hardcover, beautifully printed and full - chock-full! - of amazing illustrations that blew me away... and this isn't the types of style I'm usually drawn to either. I had to rush home and put it on my Amazon gotta-get Wish List and update my draft before letting it publish so I could let you know: this is worth a look-see (if you can get your hands on a copy) and well worth the price. Now back to your regularly scheduled post... ;)
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Here's the artistic description of the newly released book (the cover is shown at the head of the post), rather than a synopsis, since you're all familiar with Grimm's Little Snow White.

A breathtaking, wildly original spin on the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Harper Design’s Snow White is boldly and beautifully reimagined by acclaimed artist Camille Rose Garcia, the illustrator of the New York Times bestseller Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Delivering a fresh take on a vintage fairy tale, Garcia's dark and Disneyesque art, with its vivid colors and luscious, dripping  blacks, will weave a spell around fans of illustrated books from Daniel Egnéus’s Little Red Riding Hood to Femke Hiemstra’s Rock Candy.

This new gift edition presents the unabridged version of the Grimms’ tale, with an original interpretation by renowned artist Camille Rose Garcia that artfully combines wit and dark romance. 

Ms. Garcia's (gorgeous illustrated, laid out and printed!) book is available through Amazon HERE.

 I also recently came across this article about Ms. Garcia and her reworking of the newly released Snow White book thought I'd share. Orange County (Los Angeles) is rightly proud of this underground artist's success and the Los Angeles Times posted an interview with her just this week.

From the LA Times:

Garcia, when deciding on her tone and text, looked back to the Brothers Grimm’s 1812 version of the story but, having grown up near and in Disneyland, she also couldn’t resist the tug of the classic 1937 animated feature film. “I did look to Disney’s animated ‘Snow White’ as the watercolor backgrounds were especially beautiful,” Garcia said. “I wanted to reference Walt Disney’s style but bring in the creepy Germanic folk-tale element.”

The latter explains why, in this version, the Evil Queen devours  Snow White’s lung and liver in one passage — or, more precisely, she believes the organs that she’s snacking on belong to Snow White. Garcia’s dark-tinged retelling of the classic is in the spotlight with an exhibit at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Beverly Hills that runs through April 14. On Thursday, Garcia will be at the gallery for a 6-8 p.m. signing event and in the weeks to come she’ll be on a book tour with stops already announced for San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

You can read the whole article which details more of her artistic influences HERE.

For those interested in her Betty Boop meets Tammy Faye Baker style and who no doubt see other classic "old world" cartoon influences in her work and would like to know more, here's a video of Ms. Garcia working on some of the paintings for the book. When you see her skill in working with lines it's easy to see how she became an underground art darling who transitioned wonderfully to the respected art world. Her paintings have been shown internationally, she's been published in a variety of well known magazines and she now has works in several mainstream galleries:

There is a new book coming out in August on s. Garcia's art titled Mirror, Black Mirror. The official blurb gives us quite a bit of insight into why this artist paints as she does:

Camille Rose Garcia & her new book

Mirror, Black Mirror, chronicles the prolific and life changing time period of 2007-2011, when Garcia fled the sprawling mecca of Los Angeles, her lifelong home, and moved to a cabin in the woods of Northern California. Living so close to the natural world has given the artist even more insight into the major themes of her work, disenchantment with modern civilization, and the problems of becoming too removed from the natural world. 

Camille Rose Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California, The child of a mexican activist filmmaker father and a muralist/painter mother, she apprenticed at age 14 working on murals with her mother while growing up in the generic suburbs of Orange County, visiting Disneyland and going to punk shows with the other disenchanted youth of that era. Garcia's layered, broken narrative paintings of wasteland fairy tales are influenced by William Burroughs' cut-up writings and surrealist film, as well as vintage Disney and Fleischer cartoons, acting as critical commentaries on the failures of capitalist utopias, blending nostalgic pop culture references with a satirical slant on modern society... She recently moved to the Pacific Northwest after 38 years in Los Angeles.

See the whole blurb HERE, which details lots more about her success and where her work has been published and can be seen.

You can see more of her Snow White illustrations HERE and her book is available HERE and HERE.