Featured Artist: Maude Tanswai

About the Artist

Maude Tanswai is a visual artist with a particular interest in exploring the nature of being. Her focus is on miniature, intricately detailed pen and ink drawings and paintings. Utilizing technical pens, ink, gouache and Leroy Keuffel & Esser drafting tools, she combines freehand images of structures, events and processes with source texts and found poetry. She currently lives and works in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Follow her on Instagram at @maude_art.

Why We Love Her Artwork

When we decided on the theme hinge for our inaugural volume of OXALIS magazine, we could not have anticipated how magical the intersections would be between this motif, Maude’s intricate artwork, and the literary work we received. It was kismet that our favorite piece, “Simple Gestures” (our current website header), depicted quite literally the hinges of the body and became the cover. In her pen-and-ink drawings, Maude’s imaginative bodily structures are beautiful and haunting, invoking not only the miracles of the human body and mind, but their wilderness as well. Woven throughout the magazine, these dense forests, limbic branches, and labyrinths of fibers and flora are echoed in the poems and stories in moving ways. To enjoy Maude’s artwork in our hand-bound magazine, you may purchase OXALIS volume 1: hinge at our store.