"Norma" - shop.natalieirish.com

Houston artist Natalie Irish creates beautiful paintings with the most unusual tool, kisses. Irish fashions breathtaking portraits with nothing but lipstick as her paint and her lips as her brush. Her creative use of such an everyday item results in portraits rivaling or exceeding what some could do with a trunk full of art supplies. 

She claims she’s been doing art since she was in the womb. Well, while that may be true, Irish shows a technical skill in varying artistic realms that can only come with years of experience. Since Irish was a child, she has been drawing, painting and sculpting, dropping the jaws of those who saw her work. She is far from one-dimensional, drawing with pencil and conte, sculpting with horsehair, clay, raku and tenmoku, and painting with oils, acrylic, ink, and lipstick. Irish is really the jack of all trades and excels in every realm of art she attempts. 

Her most inspiring and interesting pieces are most notably the lipstick and thumbprint portraits. By varying the size and pressure of her lips on the canvas, Irish creates a finished product that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but artistically impressive as well. She has been featured on many art blogs and has been met with enthusiasm from art lovers around the world. 

She is a true gem of the art world, a true artist rarely seen these days. She’s not splattering paint on a canvas and calling it abstract, nor is she creating pieces with deep philosophical meaning. She is simply using her natural body to create other natural bodies on a canvas, and it’s successful. These thumbprint and kiss paintings are like a cool breeze in the world of art, and shows refreshingly true creativity and ingenuity beyond what has been done before. A portrait is a portrait, but Irish brought a new technical skill to the table and is shaking up the art world, one kiss at a time. 

Reach writer Samantha Katzman here