About the Artist

Leah Jakusovszky
1684 Zinnia Lane
San Jose, CA 95124
(408) 723-2894
wyvernwell@yahoo.com

I've loved painting and drawing as long as I can remember, but only in 1996 did I decide to embrace art as a vocation.

Since then I've experimented with watercolor, scratchboard, pastel, colored pencil, and inks. I love them all… so I tend to use whatever I can get my hands on to produce the desired effect. I particularly enjoy crumpling, spattering and staining my paper to get a chaotic, organic look, then illustrating over that with careful detail. My choice of subjects has included people, undersea life, plants, fossils and shells, animals, mythical creatures, characters, and scenes from existing fiction and pure imagination. My current series focuses on the abstract concepts of the Seasons. In my next works I'll be interpreting the Elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. My influences include: Sulamith Wulfing, Brian Froud, Alphonse Mucha, Susan Seddon Boulet, and Virgil Finlay.

One of my goals is to combine two heretofore disparate worlds: The "Fine Art" world and contemporary "Fantasy Illustration" to form a new genre. I'll know I've succeeded when people no longer know which labels to use when describing my artwork.

Studies:

B.A. Film Studies, U.C. Santa Barbara, 1991
Thalia Stratton, U.C. San Francisco
Ann Thiermann, U.C. Santa Cruz
M.E. Bailey, U.C. Santa Cruz