real lace

New Artwork: Afterimage

in ,

I’m really pleased with this piece, which features a lace overlay originally prepared for Woven Thresholds but left over after I replaced it with a version better suited to that panel’s color palette.

Both this painting and Woven Thresholds change as you move around them. Stand directly in front of the artwork, and your eye resolves each opening in the lace as an individual gap. Step back or view the panel from an oblique angle, and those tiny openings geometrically compress below your visual threshold. Your eye averages it into a single surface (exploiting the same optical mechanism as pointillist painting and halftone printing). Ironically, a flat, head-on photo is the least resolved version of the painting you’ll see!

This is Afterimage, acrylic, lace, and jacquard trim on wooden floater panel, 14x11x.5”, 2026.

While both trims draw from traditional Baltic textile iconography, Woven Thresholds relies on a classic color scheme, whereas Afterimage shifts the geometric motif and renders it in a modern, fluorescent palette.

Shelby Prindaville's mixed media painting of tulips on lace mesh with a Baltic jacquard trim on floater panel.

New Artwork: Between Worlds

in ,

My first finished mixed media painting in Estonia depicts a white stork (Ciconia ciconia).

The substrate is antique lace over wood panel. My process involved attaching the lace to the panel, painting the portrait, removing the lace and altering the coloration of the wood panel surface, and then meticulously re-registering and attaching the lace back on top and sealing it down.

These birds are embedded in Estonian rural life: they're associated with summer farms and considered good luck omens. Storks are also important in folklore, as they accompany souls to the underworld and bring newborns into the world as a part of a cycle of death and rebirth in Finno-Ugric mythology.

This is Between Worlds, acrylic and antique lace on wood panel, 14x14x1.5”, 2026.

Shelby Prindaville's mixed media lace painting of a white stork.