Art

Paintings, illustrations, curiollages &c.

Tinctures Sepia-tinted prints

I’ve recently added a new section to my Etsy shop, called Tinctures, where I offer digitally recolored versions of some of my most popular prints. I know not everyone shares my rabid enthusiasm for highly saturated colors, & to be honest, sometimes I’m in the mood for something a little more subtle myself! I do the recoloring in Photoshop, & I try to create a pleasantly muted effect without completely losing the color variations of the original– keeping just a breath of the original hues.

My word-loving friends may be curious why I call this series “Tinctures.” Though most commonly used today to describe a medicinal alcohol extract, “tincture” can also mean a tint or color. In fact it originated in Middle English, from Latin tinctura act of dyeing, from tinctus, past participle of tingere to tinge.

I like to think of these as coffee-flavored versions of my work! (Yes, I’m a java junkie.) What does that make the originals, I wonder? Fruit salad, perhaps?

Durga’s Embrace Digital Illustration (Photoshop)

On 11 February, my little sister Sarah suffered a stroke. It was completely unexpected– she is relatively young & extremely health-conscious, with no obvious risk factors. But the stroke was massive & for a time she was very close to death, in intensive care with many complications adding to our worries.

I’m very thankful to the doctors & everyone else at Duke for seeing her through this perilous time, & for all the support from family & friends. I’ve been spending many nights in the hospital, & have seen first-hand the hard work of all the doctors, nurses & therapists that collaborate to care for someone in this condition. And I see how Sarah draws strength from the flood of cards & messages from her students & fellow teachers, her friends in the environmental education movement, & the many, many others who care about her.

Sarah is an amazing person, & in some ways also very lucky. Though her left side is still entirely immobile, & for weeks she was unable to talk, she was able to sign the word “stroke” on her first day after the operation (one of her many linguistic skills is ASL), & she could also write much sooner than the doctors had expected. Better still, it was clear that not only had she retained her ability to think & communicate, but also her personality, which is full of humor & a strong streak of mischief, along with great curiosity & caring about the world.

One night I was with Sarah, helping her do some guided meditation to cope with pain. Sarah had traveled to India last summer, a life-changing voyage in many ways, & Hindu imagery was particularly fresh in her mind. She wrote on her clipboard that she envisioned the goddess Durga cradling & supporting her with her many arms, & asked if I would draw her a picture to help her focus on that image.

For weeks I had been so consumed with worry & care for Sarah that I was unable to bring myself to draw or paint– I had tried sketching once or twice, but my heart just wasn’t in it. But having that “assignment” motivated me to make art again, & I must say, it felt good!

Sarah moved from the hospital to acute rehab this week, & of course this picture is decorating the wall of her new room. She’s able to talk now, to joke with everybody, even to sing a little! Yesterday she stood (with assistance) for the first time. It’s going to be a long & arduous journey back to health, but I’m certain that, just as after her voyage to India, she will come back full of new insights & energy.

Blue Carbon Based Flowers AlphaBands ~ C & D

So… I’m cheating a bit here. I began this image in homage to Carbon Based Lifeforms, a Swedish ambient music band that is one of my favorites to listen to while sketching. Their music is mostly instrumental with wordless vocals, but lyrics do come in from time to time, such as these:

“Only illogics can find
Hidden flaws in a straight logic line.
Only erratics recognize
Errors in patterns of a perfect design.”

These particular lifeforms were of course heavily influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel, with the central structure inspired by an allotrope of carbon popularly known as the Buckyball.

Unfortunately, some very erratic household chaos kept me away from the computer last week, so I missed my chance to chime in with the “C”s for AlphaBands. But as it happened, my choice for “D” was the bizarre alter ego of Kool Keith known as Dr. Octagon. Though his music could hardly be more different from CBL, (and, I should warn, it is mostly extremely NSFW) some of his color-crazed & hallucinatory lyrics somehow wormed their way into the picture:

“I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope
Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep beep
Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap
Look at the land…blue flowers!
Drawing by the purple pond, in the purple pastures blue flowers!
Drawing by the purple pond, yellow ink that flows blue flowers!
Drawing by the pond, look, it’s raining yellow”

So, consider this the visual equivalent of a mashup. It’s just a pity that Buckyballs are constructed from hexagons & pentagons, with nary an octagon in the picture.

Photoshop with text scanned from Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry, 1876

Animal Collective AlphaBands

It’s the beginning of a new alphabet challenge! This time around it’s AlphaBands, the brainchild of Sam Wolk. We’re doing images inspired by bands for every letter of the alphabet, & we’d love for you to join us! If you’d like to enter your work, please check out the rules & enter here.

I’ve decided that rather than depicting the band members themselves I’ll mostly do illustrations inspired by their name, their sound, or their songs. My first entry is for the experimental band, Animal Collective– check out their music here. One of the members goes by the name Panda Bear, but the other animals are just what came out of my pencil as I sketched. The illusion of three heads, six bodies was inspired by a traditional Japanese visual trick.

Photoshop with text from the good old Practical Standard Dictionary. What I’d really love to do is animate this piece so that the animals spin– maybe I’ll have time to update later this week. :-)

Nimiety Acrylic on collaged text on canvas, 6"x6"

This is the final image for A.Word.A.Day— it appeared last week but I forgot to post it here. This fellow is certainly dressed for excess! It was really a hoot to paint.

The original is sold, but prints are available in my Etsy shop.

Goodly Creature Acrylic on collaged text & diagrams on six canvases, 6"x6" each

Finally I have prints of this piece available on Etsy! Individual parts or all six elements in a bundle, in case you’d like to genetically engineer your own example of Zoorobotany!

p.s. If you’re interested in how this piece came to be, there’s a slide show on my process page.

Dreaming Acrylic painting on map and music collage on canvas, 30" x 24"

You may have seen bits & pieces of this image before, but here’s the whole thing!

At last I am able to make prints of this available on Etsy. They’re not full-size (about half that), but much bigger than my usual small prints. (When I tried to reduce them to standard printer-paper size, you could hardly see the details at all!)

Unrelated note: today’s A.Word.A.Day painting is Ineluctable. A warm welcome to all of you who are arriving here from that site. (For the rest of you, if you haven’t yet wandered through this wonderland of words, head on over now!) And if you’d like to know more about the painting itself, see my previous post.

Disprize Acrylic painting on map and music collage on canvas, 30" x 24"

Sometimes one must refrain from eating, if only to make a statement. ;-)

This image was created for Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, where it’s featured today. If you love words, you should definitely sign up for Anu’s daily emails— they are always a delight.

The original painting as well as prints are available in my Etsy shop.

Ineluctable Curiotype Alphabet

This may be a bit of a stretch for Illustration Friday’s topic, but who among us doesn’t walk through the valley of the shadow of death (& taxes), at least some of the time? After all, they’re ineluctable!

This is yet another painting in the series I’ve been working on, whose purpose will be revealed soon. (Although anyone who tries can figure it out with very little effort.) In addition to invoking the Grim Reaper and the IRS, it includes an ineluctable nod to James Joyce, though you may have to click on the image to be able to read it.

Confession: this painting was intended for my Halloween post, not Thanksgiving! But that week I was visited by a monster of a fever, & rather than getting in the holiday mood by painting Death, I got to feel like death warmed over. The good part is that, now that I’m finally healthy again, just being able to walk around doing everyday tasks without feeling like a zombie makes me feel grateful every minute of the day, so I’m going to be very ready to give thanks tomorrow!

I’m also enormously grateful to every one of you out there in Internet Land who visits this blog. I never thought it would be possible to feel so close to people I’ve never met, but internet magic makes it so. You encourage & inspire me, you make me smile & laugh, sometimes you even make me cry (in a good way). THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart!

Original Painting & Prints available in my Etsy shop

Felicitous Acrylic on collaged text on canvas, 6"x6"

Another in the probably-not-so-mysterious series that began with Malinger.

It is felicitous indeed that Illustration Friday’s word this week is “tail”– this fellow not only sports his own fine fox tail, but also holds a bunch of foxtail grass. Also featured (though tail-less) are foxgloves, some glowing foxfire mushrooms, & some faux-foxing around the edges of the paper.

Original Painting ~SOLD~

Prints Available in my Etsy shop

Leah Palmer Preiss ~ Curious Art

Art, Lettering, Oddments & Curiosities

Art