The Quilliad is thrilled to announce that we will be publishing the art of Eden Bachelder in our fifth issue! She’s an excellent example of the emerging talent in Canada. Originally from North Bay, Eden Bachelder moved to Toronto in 2004 and has lived here ever since. She studied English literature at Nipissing University, earning a BA, and received an honours BFA in visual art from York University. While at York, she studied everything from painting and drawing to sculpture, screenprinting, and woodworking. At Ty Templeton’s* Comic Book Bootcamp, she studied page layout, penciling, inking, digital colouring, and anatomy.
What really struck us about Eden’s art was her beautiful and unusual style. Her work is both dark and whimsical. Some of her darkest subjects have a peculiar friendliness to them (even if they would be most likely to gnaw your face off if you encountered them in real life), while her most cheerful subjects are often slightly eerie. The wide eyes of her creatures, both real and imagined, draw the viewer in, while her masks lend their owners the ability to transform into something magical.
While she has previously done illustration and commissioned animal portraiture, she now works primarily in acrylic, watercolour, ink, and pencil for her two-dimensional pieces, and makes her masks and jewelry by hand out of leather. Her paintings depict both the natural and the monstrous with the same bold lines. Her subjects are drawn from nature and mythology; past painting series include ravens, sea monsters, and colourful koi fish. Her masks are a similar blend of fantasy and fauna, featuring Lovecraftian creatures, birds, snakes, griffins, and fantasy creations.
In addition to featuring in our upcoming issue of The Quilliad, Eden will be spending this summer as artist-in-residence at Lilibird in Bala, Ontario, where she’ll have a studio in an old stone church. If you’d like to see more of her work, be sure to visit her website, edenbachelder.com, and her online store, edenbee.etsy.com. You’ll have to wait to see which of her pieces we’re publishing this issue!
Our submission call is still open, so if you have poetry, a short story, flash fiction, a painting, illustrations, comic art, or photography to send us, email thequilliad@gmail.com. If you are interested in contributing to our fifth-issue Kickstarter, check it out at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1765917797/the-quilliad-issue-5. We have great rewards available, including copies of The Quilliad, poetry on demand, art prints, and pinback buttons.
The Quilliad 