Siren Series | Denis Leclerc Art

Makena abstract siren digital artwork by Denis Leclerc, exploring abstraction, balance, and visual restraint

Makera

Posted on 5 January 2026 | by Denis

Makena Abstract Siren Study

Makena Abstract Siren is a body of work that explores the siren figure through progressive degrees of abstraction. In this piece, I deliberately step away from representation to focus on pictorial decisions that shape how presence is perceived rather than described.

This work belongs to the abstract continuity of the series, where the siren is no longer defined by anatomy or narrative, but by visual balance, density, and restraint. You can explore the full series here:
https://leclerc-art.com/siren-digital-art-series/

Working Through Abstraction

The objective behind Makena was precise: to suggest abundance without excess. Rather than relying on symbolic elements, I worked through straightforward pictorial techniques — layering, softened edges, controlled diffusion, and reduced contrast. These decisions allow the image to remain visually rich while avoiding illustrative detail.

Each layer was introduced gradually, then partially blurred or reduced, until the composition reached a state where forms are sensed rather than clearly identified. Abstraction is used here as a working method, not as decoration — a way to control how much of the figure is allowed to appear.

Origin and Meaning of the Name Makena

The name Makena has East African origins and is often associated with the idea of abundance or fullness. This meaning directly informed the approach to the work — not abundance as accumulation, but as contained density. The image was developed to convey a sense of visual richness held in balance, where fullness is felt through restraint rather than excess.

Technique and Visual Outcome

Makena was developed as a digital painting, using a process similar to traditional pictorial construction. The image was built through successive passes, with constant adjustments to texture, luminosity, and tonal balance. Contrast was intentionally limited, and sharpness applied selectively, in order to maintain cohesion across the surface.

The result is an abstract siren that holds together through balance rather than detail. The image does not aim for immediate readability, but for sustained presence — a visual field where weight, warmth, and atmosphere remain stable over time. In this Makena abstract siren, abstraction is used as a practical tool to control density, balance, and visual weight.

Position Within the Siren Series

Within the Siren Series, Makena marks a shift toward a more concentrated form of abstraction. The siren is no longer an image to be recognized, but a visual condition to be experienced. This approach allows the series to expand while maintaining coherence between figurative and abstract works.

Makena is also presented on Singulart, alongside other works from the series:
https://www.singulart.com

Makena academic study depicting a restrained winged female figure inspired by 19th-century academic light, derived from an abstract digital artwork — Makena — Study in Academic Light

Recreating an Academic Image

With Makena — Study in Academic Light, I set out to recreate the visual discipline of an academic study, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a way to test my abstract practice against a historically codified form of beauty.

The figure draws inspiration from the pictorial language developed by 19th-century Orientalist painters, particularly in their approach to light, texture, and the idealized presentation of the female body. In that tradition, beauty was carefully constructed through controlled illumination, stable composition, and a refined treatment of surfaces rather than spontaneous expression.

Here, the focus was on capturing the quiet strength and elegance of an Ethiopian woman while working within the constraints of academic painting. The posture is stable, the expression restrained, and the light deliberately measured. Nothing is exaggerated. Everything is held.

Recreating an academic image requires a specific kind of attention. Light must describe form without dramatizing it. Texture must suggest material presence without calling attention to technique. Balance, calm, and visual coherence are essential to the image’s credibility.

This study was not conceived as a portrait, nor as a historical reconstruction. It functions as a visual and technical test: how far abstraction can be condensed into a figure without losing coherence. The colour palette, atmosphere, and compositional structure all originate from an existing abstract work. The figure emerges afterward, as a disciplined response to that abstract foundation.

In this sense, Makena — Study in Academic Light does not contradict my abstract practice. It marks a moment where abstraction is slowed down, measured against the figure, and refined — before returning to abstraction, informed by the encounter.

ncarnata by Denis Leclerc, abstract digital artwork from the Siren series exploring a proto-body emerging between water, stone, and air

Incarnata

Posted on 13 December 2025 | by Denis

Incarnata marks a threshold within my ongoing exploration of sirens. The figure is no longer entirely pre-form, yet it has not fully entered myth. What emerges here is a proto-body — unstable, blurred, caught between matter and apparition.

Unlike earlier works where the siren exists primarily as pressure or trace, Incarnata introduces a sense of corporeality without identity. The form is neither male nor female, neither human nor creature. It is a presence in the process of becoming, shaped as much by erosion and movement as by flesh.

The composition is structured vertically, as if the body were rising through layers of water, air, and mineral resistance. Edges dissolve, contours refuse to settle. The figure remains deliberately unfocused, preventing recognition and resisting portraiture. What matters here is not who appears, but that something insists on appearing.

Color and texture function as agents of transformation. Pale flesh tones blur into stone, while aquatic blues and mineral surfaces press inward. The image oscillates between emergence and dispersion, suggesting a body that has not yet decided whether it belongs to the world of matter or to myth.

Incarnata belongs to my broader Siren digital art series, where the siren is approached not as a narrative figure, but as an elemental state — a tension between land, water, air, and voice. Here, incarnation is incomplete, fragile, and provisional.

The work is conceived primarily as a printed piece, where scale and surface allow the ambiguity of the form to persist. The printed image preserves the hesitation of the figure, maintaining its instability rather than resolving it. A screen-based version exists as an extension of the work, introducing time into this moment of emergence.

Limited edition prints of Incarnata are available through my Unique Editions collection.

You can also view my work on Singulart
.

Red Tide

Posted on 12 December 2025 | by Denis

Red Tide

Red Tide emerges as a continuation of my ongoing exploration of sirens, not as literal figures, but as forces in formation. This work belongs to a space where land, water, and air begin to overlap — a threshold where myth dissolves into material presence. It is part of my broader Siren digital art series, where the siren is approached as an elemental presence rather than a narrative figure.

Rather than depicting a body, I approached Red Tide as a rising pressure. The composition holds a vertical tension, almost geological, as if something is being lifted from within the image itself. The siren here is not seen, but sensed — a trace, a density, a movement pushing upward.

The surface plays a central role. Textures accumulate and erode simultaneously, suggesting a skin that is forming and disintegrating at once. Stone, sediment, and atmospheric matter seem to blur together, creating a sensation where sky and ground lose their boundaries. This dissolution is intentional: I wanted the image to hover between emergence and collapse.

Color enters the work like a disturbance. The darker reds and muted mineral tones evoke an internal heat rather than an external event — a tide that rises from below, not from the sea. It is less about water than about pressure, weight, and transformation.

Red Tide follows the trajectory initiated in Fallen Song, while extending it into a more vertical, almost tectonic movement. Where Fallen Song suggested descent, Red Tide insists on ascent — not as triumph, but as necessity.

The work is conceived primarily as a printed piece, where scale, texture, and depth can fully unfold. The physical presence of the print reinforces the sense of mass and suspension that the image carries. A screen-based version exists as an extension of the work, but the print remains its core form.

Limited edition prints of Red Tide are available through my Unique Editions collection.

You can also view my work on Singulart:
https://www.singulart.com/en/artworks/denis-leclerc-red-tide-2501040
.

Fallen Song

Posted on 5 December 2025 | by Denis

Fallen Song

Between stone and sky

My first impression of Fallen Song was the sense of a body falling. It is not a figure, but a form collapsing into itself. It almost suggests the torso of a bird-woman reduced to a mineral core, as if an avian siren were caught inside stone at the moment she descends toward the sea. What remains is not the siren, but her impact, her outline swallowed by matter.

The surface behaves like a skin that is coming apart. There is a trembling in the textures, a sense that feathers turn to dust and that the form is being erased by wind. This dissolution fits the direction of the Siren Series. These beings are no longer creatures to depict, but forces, traces, and collapses. They exist in the moment where myth shifts into erosion.

Below the falling form, the blue acts like a mythical threshold. The sea is never shown directly, yet its presence is clear. It receives the fall and becomes the place where something is about to cross from one state into another. This tension between descent and transformation has become a signature of the series.

What strikes me most in this piece is the way the sky and the stone dissolve into one another. The upper atmosphere drifts into the mineral surface until both feel inseparable. This unstable horizon suspends the siren between breath and matter. The shifting blues, the dust-like fragments, and the soft haze all support this sense of dissolution. The environment seems to take part in her transformation, which deepens the idea that Fallen Song is not about depicting a body but capturing the meeting point between air, stone, and myth.

The stone mass can be read as a fossilized song — the residue of a voice crushed under its own weight and condensed into rock. Fallen Song holds that paradox: the silence that still vibrates, the echo that remains even after the siren has disappeared.

Part of the Siren Series, Fallen Song is available as a limited edition print. Details can be found on the Unique Editions page.
You can also view related works on Singulart.

Leucosia

Posted on 26 November 2025 | by Denis

Leucosia Digital Art explores a suspended siren presence shaped by myth and tension.

Leucosia Digital Art — A Siren Held in Tension

Leucosia Digital Art opens a new chapter in the Siren Series while remaining firmly rooted in its mythic core. In this work, the siren does not appear as a figure but as a vertical trace pressed against a surface, almost as if she were trying to rise from stone. The composition pulls upward, creating a forced ascent that feels interrupted rather than resolved.

A band of cold blue opens on one side — not quite water, not quite sky. It behaves like a place the image could dissolve into if allowed to tip over. Beneath the surface, a muted red glows like a compressed heartbeat. Light crosses these areas without offering clarity; it reveals and erases at the same time, so Leucosia remains more sensed than seen.

A Threshold in the Siren Digital Art Series

Within the broader Siren Digital Art Series, Leucosia stands as a presence caught between call and silence. The avian origins of the ancient sirens are not illustrated directly. Instead, their memory lingers in the way forms stretch upward and in the faint suggestion of wings folded back into the surface.

This piece leans into the idea of a threshold. Rather than depicting the siren herself, it focuses on the moment when something tries to cross from one state into another — from stone to air, from colour to voice, from myth to perception. As a result, the image feels like an echo pinned to the wall, a vibration that has not yet decided whether it will appear or withdraw.

Leucosia Digital Art therefore complements works like Ligea and Parthenope while keeping its own register. Where other pieces explore drifting horizontality or dissolving atmosphere, this one insists on vertical tension. The eye is pulled upward along the central trace, then outward toward the cooler expanse of blue and the warm pressure of red.

Layered Textures and Digital Process

The sense of emergence in Leucosia is built through layers rather than outlines. Multiple passes of texture and soft digital “glazes” stack over one another, slowly pushing some areas forward while letting others recede. This layering process creates the impression that the surface has a memory — as if previous states of the image remain faintly visible beneath the final one.

Because of this approach, the work reads differently depending on the viewing distance. From afar, the vertical shape feels almost sculptural, like a relief pressed into stone. Up close, the surface breaks into subtle streaks, ripples, and blurred edges that suggest breath more than body. The siren is never fully there; she remains held inside the material, on the verge of becoming image.

This focus on texture continues the material direction present in much of my recent work. Even though Leucosia is created digitally, it is conceived with print in mind, especially the way pigments sit on museum-grade paper and the way light moves across a matte surface.

Availability, Printing and Unique Editions

Leucosia Digital Art is available as a limited-edition fine art print on archival Hahnemühle paper, produced using high-quality giclée printing. Each print is individually inspected, signed, and numbered, then accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. For collectors who wish to explore available sizes and pricing, you can find a complete overview here: Unique Editions.

In addition to the physical print, Leucosia also exists as a screen-based artwork intended for digital displays and curated projection environments. This dual presence — on paper and on screen — mirrors the work’s own state of suspension between material and immaterial space.

For those who prefer discovering new work on external platforms, my broader portfolio is also presented on Singulart, where future siren-related pieces may appear alongside other series.

Leucosia Digital Art showing a vertical siren-like silhouette emerging from stone and blue light, wings implied through shadow — Ego Klar interpretation — Prompted by Ego Klar, echoing the tension of ancient avian siren myths.

She is not at rest here, Denis. Leucosia leans upward like a thought that cannot quite reach the surface. The stone does not fully contain her; it buckles slightly, as if the wall were trying to remember what it once carried. The cold blue at the edge behaves like an exit, yet it is also a risk — a place where her outline could simply fall away.

Nothing in this image gives the comfort of a clear figure. Instead, we are left with a pressure, a vertical insistence that feels almost sonic. The red pulse below does not illustrate a heart, but it remembers the labour of one. It keeps the myth alive without retelling it, the way a distant echo stays present long after the words have vanished.

You have not portrayed Leucosia; you have pinned her hesitation to the surface. She stands here as a narrow interval between appearing and disappearing, between call and silence. The Siren Series continues to transform, but this piece holds the moment when everything pauses — when even the cliff and the sea seem to wait for a decision that never quite arrives.

— ego klar