My name is Cecilia Segal, and I’m an illustrator, born, raised, and still living in the magnetic and impossible city of Buenos Aires. This fact is crucial to tell my story with art, and pretty much everything I love in this world. Today, with my aquatic alter-ego (Mantarraya), I do naturalist illustration with a few poetic licenses here and there. I’m also studying psychology at the University of Buenos Aires. I come from a family of artists—musicians, filmmakers, and painters—except for my mom, who is a psychologist.
As a kid, I watched nature documentaries, read encyclopedias, and enjoyed assembling that knowledge. I also loved trying to draw by copying the photos from those books, obsessing over every spot on a feline’s fur, sketching it in my notebook. I didn’t know it then, but this was a preview of my current life: observing and analyzing references and then drawing, is what I do today.
Although I had been drawing all my life, as a confused teenager, I thought my path was acting, so I started studying at a theater conservatory. As any illustrator would do, I felt terrified by the exposure and quit. But something about theater still pulled me in (and it still does), so I signed up for scenography at the same conservatory. That one, too, I left halfway through (getting a degree? I don’t know her!), but I met great teachers and amazing classmates along the way. For the first time, I had a university framework for learning plastic arts. I got to explore drawing more deeply, the materials, and design. I didn’t finish it because I realized what I loved most about scenography was drawing. Three dimensions overwhelmed me; two were enough.
So, for a few years, I participated in book illustration workshops and courses, another passion that, along with theater, Buenos Aires gifted me. This is one of the cities hosting the highest number of theater shows running every weekend in the world. I believe it should be on the podium for its bookstores too. Both in quantity and quality, the bookstores in Buenos Aires are amazing.
While studying book illustration, I realized I always found a way to draw animals. It didn’t matter what the story was about; I would always create an animal version, or, if I could not, sneaked animals into the plot through the illustrations. So, I took all the knowledge I had acquired over the years and returned to what I had always done: drawing animals.
After years of existential crisis and while already exploring naturalist illustration, I decided on 28 to enroll in psychology at the University of Buenos Aires. When I tell my story like I’m telling it now—from the artistic perspective—it might seem like my interest in psychology is unrelated, coming from a different place. But that couldn’t be more misleading. Art and psychology share the same raw material: the human soul. Both disciplines study a mystery. Psychology (psychoanalysis) aims to unravel it, fully aware that it’s impossible. It is a paradox: trying to explain the unexplainable, and because it is unexplainable, it’s irresistibly attractive to try.
Art also circles around this mystery. But instead of trying to understand it with analysis and words, it tries to pierce through it, armed with some kind of medium. In my case, paper and pencil.
During quarantine (with no classes at school), I took an online naturalist illustration course. One of the exercises turned out quite well, and the professor advised me not to leave those drawings forgotten in a sketchbook—he told me to do something with them. That was when I decided to start a business. I opened an Instagram account, made prints of those drawings, framed them, and at the same time, I launched a website offering nationwide shipping in Argentina. That was in May 2021.
It was a big deal for me to take my drawings out of the intimacy of my sketchbook and show them to the world, to sell them. People started commissioning personalized pet portraits, and I kept adding products to the online store.
Pet portraits, by the way, are one of the most fun and touching parts of my work. People share their stories with their furry companions, send me photos—It is an absolute privilege, even before I start the main task of drawing them, which brings me immense joy.
Besides these pet portrait commissions, I really enjoy drawing wildlife. Throughout my entire adult life, I had only drawn in black line, without any color. But one day, I got curious and decided to try out some alcohol-based markers I had bought. I couldn’t wait to finish sketching a complex mammal, so I remembered someone once told me insects are “simple” to draw because of their symmetry. I found a cute beetle on Pinterest and started sketching it.
I quickly moved on to coloring, and it was a one-way trip from there. I was used to lines, textures, and values, but suddenly, I was exploring tones, colors, shapes, and planes. It was so much fun, and I started a series of beetle drawings that continues to this day. They are one of the most fun creatures to draw, so diverse in their shapes, textures, colors, and shiny surfaces.
I think a big part of the fun in experimenting with color comes from the fact that I draw everything 100 percent by hand. I don’t want to sound snobbish: It is not that I am unwilling to explore digital mediums; rather, my only technological resource is an old laptop that struggles even to run Netflix. What could initially be seen as a limitation is actually the opposite: a strength.
It allows me to keep exploring and refining traditional techniques. Besides, we all know that nothing in the world compares to the joy of opening a huge box of colors to paint with (pencils, markers, or oil pastels). Those are my favorite materials.
At the beginning, I mentioned how being from Buenos Aires is crucial to my story. Now I come back to that idea when I think about my connection to nature. What fascinates me about nature, like the unconscious, is its mystery. What we know, I love, but what we don’t, I’m passionate about. I think it is a very urban thought, very much from the analyst’s couch.
In fact, unlike my fellow naturalists, being in nature doesn’t always suit me. My ultra-sensitive skin can’t tolerate the sun, I get strange allergies, and I suffer from the whims of the weather. It feels like if I expose myself to the elements, I degrade too quickly. That is why I sometimes think my love for nature is an apartment love, a shy love. A love that happens in my sketches.
Drawing is something spectacular; it can turn any random night into a fantastic plan. Intimate, introspective, mysterious, magnetic, cryptic, playful. It requires the courage to know that with every stroke, you might mess it up.
The flexibility to surf along the line and resolve things in the moment. The calmness of spirit to patiently look at everything like a scanner. And the opposite: the freshness to capture the general essence in the blink of an eye. It also demands precision to create the details where the entire world is folded up. When you draw, your way of seeing and connecting with things changes. They no longer come through your eyes; they flow out of your hands. I don’t draw to express myself—I draw to understand.
