Teenagers and the Internet are a no-brainer combination, and websites from Facebook to Pitchfork are well aware of this. They know those fickle beasts called “trends” are more than alive and kicking, but they also know that loyalty and honesty can’t be put on the back-burner: they need to be squarely front and center. Martina Fugazzotto, a 25-year-old self-described designer based out of Brooklyn, New York USA, makes sure this happens at gURL.com, a content site and online community aimed at teenage girls, and with her own personal work, which she showcases on her website, MartinaMartina.com. It’s difficult to pin Fugazzotto’s work; some images look like they belong in a lusciously illustrated graphic novel, while others seem to embody a sense of frenzied, rambunctious kitsch. A constant thread found weaving through most of her work, however, is the intricate mix of loud and subtle takes on gender, emotions, and physical development, and the ways in which sexuality, stereotypes and frankness play into those topics.

While Fugazzotto dons quite a few different hats at gURL – html-maker, coder, advertiser, game-maker and writer – it’s her comics that have cultivated a readership of inquiring minds wanting or, sometimes, not wanting to know.

“When I first started making comics for gURL, I used to put my email on every comic, which was a bit of a mistake. I got and still get a lot of angry emails,” says Fugazzotto, who can trace the messages back to the fact that her comics, with titles wavering between the innocuous and the controversial (think My Ideal Mate and My Vagina, Myself), are all based on true events that happened to her.

“Readers have written in thinking they were trying to help me, especially after the Girls In Love series, saying, ‘It’s OK, you’ll get over this stage, you just need to turn to god,’ or ‘I can’t believe you’d do that and write a comic about it,’ but at the same time, I’ve gotten emails saying ‘Thanks for making it easier to read about this tough stuff.’ ”

Fugazzotto’s most recent comic, Cheat, chronicles her decision to break up with a boyfriend after cheating on him and making him believe that he was the one in the wrong. Using muted greens, blues and grays as her color palette, and relying on more traditional comic-frames that don’t always rely on text, the aesthetic and tone are decidedly more mature, tense and somber than her other comics, and this did not go unnoticed by readers.

“People reacted to the style of drawing, which surprised me. I didn’t think it’d be that popular, but it really was,” says Fugazzotto. “A lot of readers wrote in with ‘I can’t believe you would do that, why did you do that?’ and I sort of like that reaction. Since I’ve done so many comics for the site, I like the fact that someone they like and trusted made a mistake, because that happens, too.”

The delicate position of being both young enough to relate and old enough to impart some knowledge is one that has become a central role in Fugazzotto’s overall designing for gURL:

“You have to be careful when you’re talking to teenagers because you want to teach them something, but you want to be real. You don’t want to say everyone’s good. I want to say, ‘Yeah, I did this stupid thing, and I’m not proud of it, but I did it and I’m not going to lie about it.’ ”

It has also tied in to how she makes her personal creative vision work for it, too.

“I don’t know why, but I just really like girls and the idea of female identity, and on a really shallow level too,” says Fugazzotto. “It’s a weird concept that ‘girl’ equals pink, blonde hair and cute.”

Her public and personal work are not one and the same - gURL.com tends to feature her “cutesy and kind of comic-y” humans, whereas her more personal work often points to a broader spectrum, mainly through illustrations of long-bodied girls with infinitely stretching legs and obscured faces. Despite obvious differences, she cites Superflat (a recent Japanese fine-arts movement that critiques and deconstructs manga, anime, and Western-influenced commercialism/fetishism) as one of her main inspirations. The “overdone ridiculousness” of Superflat works as a conveyor of the ways art can, according to Fugazzotto, “really play with the idea of femininity.” It’s a concept that she paradoxically “[loves] so much, but it’s not one that I necessarily believe in. I don’t think girliness is for women.”

Fugazzotto may have earned her degree in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in 2005, but her artistry began a long time before then, and even before she attended her art-focused high school.

“I was grounded all the time,” she says. “There was nothing else to do except sit in my room alone and draw. I tried to draw the girls in the fashion magazines because that’s all I had for reference.”

Pre-dating these punishments-in-disguise, Fugazzotto also spent much of her early childhood being a beauty pageant contestant, when she also took modeling, voice and interview classes, and sat for make-up applications and hair styling, which is has contribution to why she’s “into this weird, feminine ‘thing.’ ” One of her more recent projects that combined all of these influences was the creation of a Living Dead doll for an exhibit in October 2006. While she still doesn’t know how she was selected to create a doll, she set out to make one, complete with mild pink blood, pink knee socks, a snow-white dress, and bountiful Victorian-curled hair grace the plain doll-model that Mezco Toys gave her to work with. “It definitely stuck out at the show,” laughs Fugazzotto, as her doll was completely surrounded by gory, gutted, and more stereotypically dead dolls.

Considering that the majority of Fugazzotto’s work centers on feminine characters, it’s not surprising that her commercial and personal work differ for reasons beyond staying loyal to her readership’s aesthetic preferences. While gURL is not a magazine, its content is constantly updated, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for toying around with an idea, a reality that Martina tries to reconcile with.

“There’s a big time constraint when I’m working on projects for gURL, and sometimes I have to make stories shorter because I won’t have enough time to finish them, so I have to edit myself a lot,” she says. “At the same time, it keeps you constantly doing different stuff, so when I do work for myself I hang all over it for months, use pens, inks and paints, think about it, re-do it, throw it away, and start again. It’s a luxury to be able to do that.”

Working with a design medium like the Internet has greatly shaped her view of how to judge the finality of a piece and how to handle personal development as an artist; ultimately, they’re questions that she’s not sure how to answer.

“I feel like I have more control on the web because if I see a mistake, or something I’d like to do a little differently, I can just change it in 20 minutes and put it back up on the website,” Fugazzotto says.

Presenting her work in galleries, however, is a whole other story. Having shown her work in galleries in London, the Philippines, France, and throughout the United States, Fugazzotto enjoys the exposure but wishes for the impossible: the flexibility of technology.

“Once I send my painting to a gallery, it’s there and I can’t fix it. I’m trusting someone else to hang it, worrying if they’re going to light it correctly,” she notes. “I’m also progressing so much that I look back at a show I had two years ago and it’s embarrassing, and I can’t believe that I’ve shown such bad work, but I was really proud of it at the time. It’s scary to put work out there and actually have people see it and remember it.”

Ideally, Fugazzotto would like to “win the lottery, stay home all day working on my art and buy really expensive French paints.” In the meantime, however, she has an upcoming show at Charming Wall Gallery in New York City. The premise of the show is for art to be as accessible as possible, so an actual piece is not presented. Instead, a print of it is, and it’s priced at ten dollars to create a limitless amount of art owners who can all potentially own the same piece. She also plans to launch a NotFashion.com, a style-theory website, by this December. Fugazzotto’s ideas of design are as broad as her talents: there is a concept and motivation behind everything she does, and it’s not all sugar and spice … it’s more personal and realistic than that. It’s the new design of the female mind.

Written by d/visible contributor Adara Meyers.

Martina Fugazzotto’s comic Cheat can be found here. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Graphic Arts, Fashion, Culture, Illustration, Interview, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.