Occasionally, when I’m running dry on material for my word art, I’ll take a step back and look up quotes about words themselves. There’s a lot of material out there! And much as I considered making a piece about Natasha Beddingfield’s “These Words”, I landed on an excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket:

“Words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.”

Once I had the quote, I dug through a pile of mats in my studio. Noticeably, I’ve been shy about incorporating color into my word art. Black and white is my comfort zone, but I wanted something that could help this pop a bit more if it were hanging on a wall. The navy blue 5 x 7 inch mat caught my eye, and the size allowed me to recycle a misprinted 4 x 6 greeting card made of watercolor paper.

Usually, I’ll pencil in the boundaries of my piece. For this, I used painter’s tape to temporarily secure the paper in the mat, then carefully navigated around the edges as I completed the piece. The opening of the mat left 3 x 4.5 inches of space to cover. I was able to finish this piece within a single day, probably within a couple of hours.

Is this piece available?

“Exquisite Horror” is available in my online shop.