Maddie Blanchard/ The Art of War & Peace

Maddie Blanchard is an illustrator and painter from the UK. Horror, surrealism, the dark, and the strange have been prevalent themes in Maddie’s work from a young age, for they are places to dispel all the ugliness of the world. This expressive approach has aided her career, allowing her to create heartfelt but gritty artwork for the poster advertising Phantasmal Galleries' exhibition Scary Monsters, Super Creeps (2025), the paintings to be displayed in the set design of the TV show ‘Sex Education’ (2022), and artwork to be sold through her business Heartfelt Horror (2021-2022). Although Maddie is now an illustrator, she started her study of Animation at Cardiff Met University during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown. After one year of being taught completely online, she moved to her university’s Illustration course and deferred a year, graduating in 2024. Before this, on the Art and Design course at SGS College, she often struggled with her neurodivergence and place in this world, this turmoil fuelling the angst in her installation on Visually Evoking Fear; A study into how artwork can create feelings of discomfort through phobia, fight or flight, and the uncanny valley, which she discovered was achieved best though the ambiguity of black and white ink drawings which are now frequent aesthetics in her work. Only for rare, special pieces does she use colour.