This Friday’s Feature artist is Tahlia Day!
I love her cryptocartography and Charted Unterritories!
She writes:
In these pieces, I begin by covering pieces of paper with random watercolor washes and letting them dry, then drawing and painting over them in many layers of ink, watercolor, gouache, and other media to bring out forms and lines that I see.
This process has unpredictable results, much like the organic and geological processes that produce continents and islands; the final pieces resemble aerial views of the landscape or maps.
The titles refer to various "un-territories" that exist in the spaces around and outside concrete reality, such as phantom islands created by mapmakers, ancient cities destroyed by cataclysms, fictional and fantastical planets and kingdoms, and places from world mythology; I've also invented my own names and concepts for some of them.
I love her cryptocartography and Charted Unterritories!
She writes:
In these pieces, I begin by covering pieces of paper with random watercolor washes and letting them dry, then drawing and painting over them in many layers of ink, watercolor, gouache, and other media to bring out forms and lines that I see.
This process has unpredictable results, much like the organic and geological processes that produce continents and islands; the final pieces resemble aerial views of the landscape or maps.
The titles refer to various "un-territories" that exist in the spaces around and outside concrete reality, such as phantom islands created by mapmakers, ancient cities destroyed by cataclysms, fictional and fantastical planets and kingdoms, and places from world mythology; I've also invented my own names and concepts for some of them.
Agartha: 5 x 7 inches, ink and graphite on paper. Cartographer's Notes: Agartha is a legendary city or colony of the enlightened, said to be located within the hollow Earth and accessed via secret tunnels from the surface.
The Higher Celestial Plain: 7 x 7 inches, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and ink on paper.
Bjarmaland: 10 x 9 inches, watercolor, ink, and graphite on cut paper. Cartographer's Notes: Bjarmaland is a northern estuary region named in the Norse sagas as the home of a wealthy trading people. It is thought to have been located in northern Russia near the White Sea.
Cocytus: 5 x 7 inches, watercolor and ink on paper. Cartographer's Notes: Cocytus, the frozen river of lamentation, is one of the rivers bordering the underworld in Greek mythology.
Five Lakes Plateau: 5 x 7 inches, watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper.
Mountains of Madness 3: 4 x 9 inches, watercolor, ink, and graphite on torn paper. Cartographer's Notes: In H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, a doomed research expedition discovers nameless horrors buried in the Antarctic ice.
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