A round up of our top ten most popular prints from our book, On Love.
The bold, graphic illustrations celebrate the most essential of human emotions and are inspired by an exquisite selection of timeless poems, literary excerpts, and quotations.
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This is one of the longer quotations we've included in our collection, but it's such a good one that we just had to. In addition, it has been the most requested illustration, so this one is for you! We, like many, are captivated by Tolstoy's elegant description from Anna Karenina, and are intrigued by the idea of love (infatuation?) having a luminous quality that overwhelms our senses and penetrates us against our will.
This passage is from the scene in which Levin sees Kitty ice skating, and our illustration draws inspiration from that. In it, a skater and a winter tree are all that remain of a man's silhouette, as it becomes impossible for him to keep his desires under his hat.
The roaring twenties, when booze was illegal and dresses were flappy. We love this quotation from This Side of Paradise; it reminds us of the headlong intoxicated rush into mutual obsession - the kind of love that usually ends badly. Here, the flapper dress transforms into a martini glass as it is unzipped.
From Neruda's collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, an emotional and sensual exploration of love, infatuation and despair.
Even his most sexually charged metaphors also contain an austere appreciation of beauty and nature, at once deeply personal and highly universal. In this illustration, we wanted to capture the human form as part of nature, and the universal longing of natural elements to merge together.
Dickinson's extraordinary poetry at its most intimate. It never ceases to surprise us that Dickinson deliberately kept her work from finding a readership until after her death. Who then did she have in mind when she wrote this line?
While many artists might lose their drive in the absence of an audience, it seemed to strengthen Dickinson, giving a sense of freedom and honesty to her work that is seldom rivaled.
In this illustration, Dickinson's own handwriting and poetry radiate from a letter, forming the wings of something eternal. Her words and their message outlasted her to reach us, and they will outlast us to reach those who come after us.
From the short story Araby in his collection Dubliners.
It's the story of a young boy's first experience with love, and the merging and contrast of those feelings with the reality of his meager surroundings in Dublin. In this illustration, the cityscape merges with the silhouette of a woman, the buildings becoming decorations on her dress and the smoke from the chimneys her hair.
From one our favorite modernist poets, and one of his most sensual, candid collections,Tulips and Chimneys.
The poem has a spirit of adulation that's reminiscent of She Walks in Beauty by Byron, but without the constraints of meter or rhyme. Cummings has a gift for transforming language, and we wanted to capture that in this illustration. The illustration hints at a new kind of music, sensual and surprising, that belongs to no instrument or musician, only to itself.
This lovely line is from Shikibu’s 11th century, profoundly influential workThe Tale of Genji, which is often referred to as the world’s first novel.
Our illustration is inspired by the wagasa (a Japanese umbrella), the shape suggesting the sun’s rays beating down on a windswept landscape.
From his novel This Side of Paradise.
This particular quote serves as a great summary of the novel which is the coming of age story of a young romantic idealist. In addition to a typical third person narrative, Fitzgerald also uses epistolary letters, poetry, and a play to tell the story, giving the narrative an un-manicured, disorienting beauty.
The illustration is inspired by that disorienting beauty - the wind swaying two wild flowers into a kiss.
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but let's face it: fiction is fun. Reality can be alternately too boring, too depressing, too complicated or just a drag. Instead, do us a favor: Spin a yarn. Tell a tale. Catch a big fish, and make it sing.
This quotation comes from Fitzgerald's 1920 short story The Offshore Pirate. It's a fascinating tale about a suitor feigning to be a romantic and dangerous figure to woo the heroine, Ardita. Geeks that we are, we especially love the way it can be interpreted as Fitzgerald himself spinning a narrative to woo the reader. And like Ardita, we're enraptured and applaud his beautiful illusion.
In our illustration, a moon shines down on a ship and reflects across the waves. Because the story is, in the end, just a fiction. The objects are all made of text from Fitzgerald's stories.
