Toska by Lizzy Stewart

I always knew that Lizzy Stew­art could draw. But, when she was kind enough to send me one of her lat­est endeav­ors, Tos­ka, I real­ly got to see her draw­ing prowess first hand, not just on the inter­webs. Her beau­ti­ful style has been trans­lat­ed into a black and white litho print­ed, 20 page book that is sta­ple bound. 

Lizzy com­plet­ed the illus­tra­tions for Tos­ka after two weeks in Jan­u­ary spent with inhu­man activ­i­ty. The con­cept for the book is based on a quote by Vladimir Nabokov:

No sin­gle word in Eng­lish ren­ders all the shades of ‘Tos­ka’. At its deep­est and most painful, it is a sen­sa­tion of great spir­i­tu­al anguish often with­out any spe­cif­ic cause. At less mor­bid lev­els it is a dull ache of the soul, a long­ing with noth­ing to long for, a sick pin­ing, a vauge rest­less­ness, men­tal throes, yearn­ing. In par­tic­u­lar cas­es it may be the desire for some­thing, of some­thing spe­cif­ic, nos­tal­gia, love-sick­ness. At the low­est lev­els it grades into ennui, boredom.”

-Vladimir Nabokov

Lizzy start­ed her book off with this quote, and upon read­ing it real­ly set the tone for the entire thing. Look­ing at the images she had drawn, one does real­ly get the feel­ing of tos­ka. I spent some seri­ous time with this dur­ing a gray morn­ing, and the feel­ings con­veyed in Lizzy’s illus­tra­tions were some­thing that I could relate to. Iso­la­tion, mean­der­ing, con­tem­pla­tion — all what I gath­ered from this beau­ti­ful book. 

There was some seri­ous care tak­en into the con­struc­tion of this book. Heavy weight­ed paper and high print­ing qual­i­ty make this some­thing pre­cious. Below are some of my favorite spreads out of ‘Tos­ka’:

I found Lizzy’s work so relat­able that my orig­i­nal inten­tion with this entry was to take sort of my own form of tos­ka, but to jux­ta­pose her draw­ings with my urban neigh­bor­hood, match­ing pho­tos with images in the book. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it just could­n’t come togeth­er, but one image (of my sup­plies) is a take on a spread: 

You can buy the book in Lizzy’s Etsy store. I would high­ly rec­om­mend you do this! 

Thanks, Lizzy! 

If you have a pub­li­ca­tion, book, etc., that you’d like me to review, email me! I’d love to talk.