Meet The Artist

Greetings!

I was born in Metairie, La just outside of New Orleans. My early childhood in New Orleans and afternoons spent painting with my spirited grandmother greatly influenced my design aesthetic today.

I created ¡Fifi Gi! in 2022 naming it after my two wild and wonderful daughters, Gigi and Phoebe. I love exploring with patterns and endlessly manipulating images. I believe people are a collection of the tiniest of details, often conflicting, that come together in the most intricate and beautiful ways to tell their stories. I love the unique opportunity collage affords to find and interpret these details piecing them together to create a story.

I like using both digital and traditional analog techniques in my work which is very female-centric. I love not only the act of creating but also the process of searching or hunting for the images I use; it’s a little bit of an obsessive process I go through for each piece searching and building hundreds of pages worth of images and then re-working and manipulating them to be just so, but I like to think of it as a joyful obsession.

I am interested in the maximalist aesthetic of “more is more” and am greatly influenced by the classic pin up portraits of greats such as Pearl Frush, Joyce Ballantyne, Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, and more. I enjoy incorporating those elements into my work in a way that expands, reframes and relocates their stories from my own perspective into what I sometimes like to think of as “playfully contradictory re-imaginings”.

I feel a freedom in my work that I don’t always feel in the “real world”; it feels limitless and excessive and maybe even a little over the top at times; it’s a place to celebrate my quirks and to be delightfully bold.

And finally, I am very grateful for all my friends and family who have supported me along this journey, especially for my husband, who has been my greatest champion.

Sincerely,

Natalie Armstrong