Unquiet
Things

There is no photograph of this, as far as I know. My mother is gone, and my grandfather Boppa, and my grandmother, and just about all of our elders, and whatever documentation existed of those years is in several boxes in my sister’s houses, and anyway, this was a picture never taken. But I don’t need a photograph. My memories of it are vivid enough…I just sometimes wish one existed so that I could have a bit of proof to show myself, see! See, you once did this!

Me and my sisters at the kitchen table, drawing paper, crayons, the serious bent-head posture of children doing extremely important work. We drew little people with their little clothes and little towns and elaborate little scenarios for them to inhabit, and we made our people talk in high-pitched voices that Boppa would tease us about every time he passed through the room. It was a super huge, major part of my childhood. I loved to draw!

In second grade, the illustration of my sneakers went up on the wall for parents’ night. In sixth grade, our art teacher asked us to draw our houses, and I, thinking aspirationally, kept sneaking glances at the tattered Amityville Horror paperback I’d hidden in my desk and drew that instead. The teacher was impressed, whether by my draftsmanship or my delusion, I can’t say.

And then, somewhere not long after that, I stopped.

There was a very specific moment. I was a kid who doodled everywhere: notebook margins, assignments, the brown paper bags we cut apart to cover our textbooks. One day, someone asked me what I was doing and why. I couldn’t explain it, and the question made me feel ashamed and strange, like I’d been caught doing something that required justification I didn’t have, and furthermore, I didn’t know I needed. The surest way to deter me from something is to embarrass the crap out of me. So I stopped, just like that.

I’ve caught myself thinking that I should have been encouraged to take art classes in middle school, high school, college, and I catch myself on that “should have” every time. What I guess I mean is that I wish someone had noticed something that gave me joy and said, keep going. Not really because I needed external permission to pursue it, but because I was a kid, and kids sometimes need someone to see them before they can see themselves.

Maybe this is how I eventually came to writing about art instead of making it. Art, like anything or maybe everything, is a practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If you don’t do it at all, the muscles atrophy, the instinct dwindles, and returning to it, or arriving at it for the first time, really, gets harder. I have known this for years. I have written around it for years. I love art so extravagantly, so helplessly, that I found my way to it through the door I knew how to open, which was language. I became someone who writes about the things I could not bring myself to make.

But there has always been something in me, some part of me that knows there is a marvelous, extraordinary thing inside and wants to let it out — and maybe that is drawing and maybe that is writing, and maybe I still don’t know what the creative hole even is that lets my light into the world.

When we moved to Jacksonville, we made new friends, and one of them gave me a box of secondhand creative supplies: stamps and stickers and journaling things, some of it never used. We started having craft days. I began in the shallow end, coloring books and zentangles, before deciding I was going to pursue my actual childhood dream, which was drawing flowers. I bought a lovely flower-drawing guide, collected tutorials, and I have been practicing for months now. Alongside those kaleidoscopic zentangles. Cut-and-paste surrealist poetry collages. Decorative journaling.

I tried to go slow at first. (as this was meant to be developing a practice, not acquiring a collection, and I know how my brain works when it comes to gathering supplies as opposed to using supplies.) I will admit the journal stack has grown exponentially, and I have gone from someone who didn’t own a single marker to someone who now has half a dozen boxes of them… and also colored pencils and watercolors and pastels (So, you know. “Slow.” Hehehe.)

Another thing I started doing that makes it not scary for me: I am a quasi-hermit who doesn’t do much, which means my daily planner has historically contained entries like “take pills, pay bills, wear sunscreen.” Not exactly a rich chronicle. But on the same page alongside the basic to-do list, I’ve started doing a small illustration a day, practicing what I’ve been learning in a low-stakes way, because it’s just a doodle in a planner and not expensive art paper, which is really intimidating! Just a little drawing next to “lift weights.” (Which somehow never gets crossed off the list.) It keeps me in the practice without the pressure of treating it like capital-A Art.

I know it sounds cheesy, but…my life has felt richer? if that’s the right word? these past few months. Getting over yourself, all the inexplicable shame and embarrassment, and flabby, languishing art muscles, is a hell of a thing, and working on these projects is fun and freeing. In a way that writing (which I love and hate in equal measure sometimes) is absolutely, definitively not.

Last week, Yvan and I were watching something on YouTube when Lucy needed to go outside to pee, or poop, or perform some unknown third dog operation, and when we came back in, he asked if I wanted to keep watching. No, I had to get back to my project. “My art is very important,” I loftily informed him.

Yvan nodded sagely (because he is on my level and he gets it.) “That sounds like something you should write about,” he said. He’s right. But immediately after I do, I am gonna draw a flower about it, too.

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Last summer I wrote a blog post musing on the green slime that got unceremoniously dumped on your head if you uttered the words “I don’t know.” (80s babies remember You Can’t Do That On Television, right?)

If at the time you read it and thought, this feels like it’s going somewhere … you were right. That was a plant. A deliberate, sneaky little entree designed to get you thinking about uncertainty and not-knowing, so that when I finally announced this, you might feel the satisfaction of having seen it coming.

So. Here it is.

The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny, and Unexplained is my fourth book, following The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, and it publishes September 1st from Frances Lincoln/Quarto.

This book has been a long time coming, and it grew from a handful of frustrations that had been rattling around in my head for years. People I know, generally smart and interesting people, making shit up rather than simply saying “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.” Decades of images circulating on Tumblr and Pinterest and a thousand fashion blogs captioned “artist unknown,” and nobody bothering to wonder who or taking a few seconds to search around. The creeping cultural sense that not knowing something is either A. just the way it goes because it’s too hard to find an answer or B. a failure best not admitted, rather than a starting point to find potentiall something really cool.

And then there was the Richard Bober mystery. Some of you were there for it! In 2023 I wrote a blog post about a A Wrinkle in Time paperback cover I had been obsessed with for years, lurid, hypersaturated, genuinely nightmare-inducing, and could not for the life of me find an artist credit for. That post took on a life of its own: Reddit ran wild with it, WBUR’s Endless Thread podcast picked it up, the New York Times covered it, and eventually the mystery was solved. The artist was Richard Bober. I wanted that image for The Art of Fantasy but couldn’t use it because I didn’t know who made it until after the book was published

Well, guess what friends? It’s in this book!!!

Mystery, curiosity, the refusal to shrug and move on, and the extraordinary things that happen when you sit with and marinate in the not-knowing long enough to let it become something. That’s what this book is about.

Twelve chapters. Four parts. Forces Beyond, Realms Between, Remnants, Relics and Revelations, and The Human Mystery: cosmic forces and hidden watchers, parallel worlds and liminal spaces, restless souls and forgotten knowledge, visionary states and sacred cycles. Everything that lives at the edges of what we can explain, and the artists who went looking for it anyway.

Inside its pages: Wenzel Hablik painting the cosmos like a living, crystalline, pulsing thing. Agnes Pelton alone in her converted windmill, layering gossamer veils of translucent color until her surfaces pulse with starlight. Jan Konůpek building cosmic architecture that follows dream logic rather than physics. Ionel Talpazan, Romanian refugee and self-appointed ambassador between worlds, devotedly documenting extraterrestrial craft in feverish techno-spiritual blueprints that are part technical manual, part cosmic philosophy. Léon Spilliaert on his nocturnal wanderings through a desolate seaside town, drawing staircases that spiral into the abyss until your inner ear and your intrusive thoughts reach perfect, terrible agreement.

Louise Bourgeois transforming the human torso into a living panopticon, a constellation of watching eyes. Pamela Colman Smith painting what music looked like to her, unlocking what she called “a beautiful country” that existed somewhere between her ear and her eye. Penny Slinger, feminist Surrealist, starring in her own ghost story as both haunter and haunted. Frida Kahlo splitting herself into two competing identities on a lonely bench against churning skies, blood spilling onto pristine fabric, both faces maintaining identical, unnerving composure. Which version of ourselves do we nurture, and which do we allow to bleed away?

And many, many more artists and creators who have ventured into the realms of the impossible and ineffable and returned with field notes from the other side of whatever it is we think we know.

The front cover is Linda Westin’s staggeringly sublime work. Infrared photography revealing colors that exist beyond human sight. A shadowy Swedish forest where the branches create a perfect oculus. A lush, kaleidoscopic vortex of a thing that feels less like a photograph of a forest and more like what a forest dreams about itself.

The back cover is Nona Limmen, whose photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget. That figure on the staircase, enshrouded in diaphanous white, five candles held aloft in the dark. It feels less like art and more like evidence. (If you haven’t read my recent  profile of her work, that’s your next stop!)

Both artists appear inside the book alongside hundreds of others spanning centuries and cultures, and I’ll be introducing them properly over the coming weeks and months. They trusted me with their work, and I am so deeply grateful.

…Now, can we talk about pre-orders for a moment?

I know it can feel like a small gesture, clicking a button months before a book arrives, but I want to be honest with you about what it actually does, because it matters more than most people realize. Pre-orders are counted in a book’s first-week sales figures, and that first week is disproportionately important. It’s the number that tells booksellers how many copies to stock, that signals to publishers whether a book has momentum, that influences everything from front-of-store placement to whether an author gets offered another contract. The algorithm that determines visibility on retail sites weights early sales heavily. A strong pre-order showing can mean the difference between a book that gets hand-sold by booksellers who believe in it and one that  disappears.

Publishers don’t promote books the way most people imagine. The work of actually getting this book in front of readers is on me. That’s on most authors, at every level. If this book, or any of my books, has ever meant something to you, pre-ordering is the single most effective thing you can do to help it find the readers it’s looking for. More than sharing, more than reviewing, more than telling a friend, though please also do all of those things.

The pre-order link is here (and peppered liberally throughout this post, as I am sure you have noticed). Thank you, genuinely, for being here for all of it.

I went down so many deliriously art-drenched, visually stupefying, aesthetically overwhelming rabbit holes while researching this book, and like any good rabbit hole, The Art of the Unknown will not offer certainty or even clarity. That’s not what you go down one for. (At least that’s not why I go down rabbit holes! I go to get lost!)

Anyway, what it will offer you instead is wonder — and wonder, I’ve come to believe, is the better deal.

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Somewhere, there is a mythic, lachrymose storybook from another world, and machumaYu is its illustrator and caretaker, both. They tend their inhabitants the way one tends a terrarium of singular, precious creatures: with patience, with devotion, with a face pressed to the glass, cataloguing every ceremony, every migration, every small and serious life within.

Inside, the cast goes about its business with complete solemnity: foxes and goats and wolves deep in their appointed tasks — a gloomier, more arcane Busytown, every creature with a purpose, every purpose shrouded in mystery — small cloaked figures gathering around volcanoes and caged lions, children sealed inside glass flasks, animal-headed scholars presiding over books and globes and celestial instruments.

I was deep in the “Imagery And Inspiration Of The Elements” chapter of The Art of the Occult when machumaYu’s work found me, the way certain things on Tumblr have always had an uncanny instinct for finding exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

A curious blue dog-girl hybrid sealed inside a glass flask, guarded by a winged, scaled creature and a watchful cloud, disembodied figures drifting through sky above a medieval castle, each wearing a different head , tree, sun, flame. I knew immediately I was looking at just one mythology among many in someone’s expansive, fully inhabited, weird, weird world.

machumaYu’s inhabitants do not know they are being watched, or if they do, they have decided it is of no matter to them. A rabbit cycles a unicycle while playing piano, reaching for the keys with total concentration. Small white-robed figures hover in solemn a circle around a caged lion wreathed in flame, themselves ensconced in a larger wheel, part of a strange cycle. An owl-headed scholar, his body composed of stacked books, holds open a text with both hands as though the answer to something urgent is in there somewhere.

None of this is played for laughs. None of it invites you to find it absurd. And yet there is something in the cumulative weight of all this earnest, diligent strangeness, creatures going about their ancient business with the focused gravity of beings who have never once questioned the logic of their world, that produces in the viewer a feeling adjacent to a gentle fondness, adjacent to amusement, but not quite either. Something warmer and more complicated than both.

machumaYu’s world did not begin when you arrived. It feels conceived in a candlelit scriptorium by someone with a melancholic disposition and an extensive knowledge of folklore, deeply committed to alchemy and the collective unconscious, and indeed it has centuries behind it, ancient myths, founding narratives, lost histories of characters whose names have dissolved into time.

The Rohm Founding Myth gives us a many-horned goat presiding over a jagged rock formation encrusted with the ruins of a miniature city, two armored figures riding an enormous wolf below, an old-world map hovering in the sky above like a record of territories long since forgotten.

Universe assembles four animal-headed figures around a root-limbed child at the center of a circular fortress, a deer holding scales, a lion clutching a book, a hare with a crystal ball, a figure whose head has become a tangle of branches, as though we have stumbled into the founding ceremony of something that will long outlast us. And yet this world is not only ancient history; it has its own living present, its own seasonal rituals and natural laws.

In The Night Party of Flowers, a doll-like girl cradles a lizard beneath lush, oversized blooms that dwarf the surrounding trees, a flower with a human face presiding at her side, a human figure with a blossom head, accompanied by an accordian, and In Death and Life: The Cycle, three animal skulls rest on the ground amid mushrooms and small plants while swirling vines wrap themselves around fox and owl and hummingbird alike, the whole composition a tender and unhurried account of everything that ends and everything that follows.

The same figures return across machumaYu’s paintings like characters in a story that has no single beginning and no fixed end. Lions and deer, foxes and hares, wolves and leopards, children with enormous solemn eyes. They migrate from painting to painting, appearing in new configurations, new landscapes, as though their lives continue between canvases in rooms we cannot see.

They move through a world rendered in the muted, dimmed palette of something viewed through old glass or remembered imperfectly — ochre and ash and pewter, the occasional bruised blue, colors that feel a little moth-eaten and weather-beaten, dusk, and shadowed and eternally overcast.

And everywhere, containers: glass flasks holding girls and unicorns, domes enclosing entire ecosystems, circular structures, armillary spheres, globes. machumaYu is drawn to the world within the world, the small and sovereign place inside the larger one, which is perhaps why their paintings feel less like windows and more like diminutive vivariums: controlled and enclosed, rare and self-sustaining behind glass, breathing its own air, following its own ancient rules.

machumaYu calls it “bright darkness,” and spending time in this world they have built, you understand just what they mean. There’s a lonely, dolorous undercurrent running beneath everything in this fanciful ecosystem, and yet there is warmth here too, and tenderness, and something that sits just beside a droll whimsy without ever quite becoming comical, and none of these things resolve into each other or cancel each other out. They companionably coexist, the way they do in the deepest parts of the human interior.

machumaYu keeps vigil over this world they have built with the attention of someone who built it from nothing and knows every corner of it, keeping faithful watch over the brightness and the darkness in careful, equal measure.

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If you have spent any time in the darker corners of the internet where contemporary artists share their work, you may have already stumbled into Nona Limmen’s world without quite knowing how you got there.

The Amsterdam-based artist has spent years filing dispatches from a mysterious place whose existence remains unconfirmed, a vast kingdom obscurely bordering our own, wrought of shadows and secrets, its towering cliffs and dark caves and veiled inhabitants glimpsed only in the grain and blur her analogue techniques produce. Her photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, specific and sourceless; impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget.

Limmen’s world has a way of finding its people. If you already speak the language of crow-black skies and candlelit staircases, of fog-eaten landscapes and figures who belong to no particular century, her photographs will locate you with an almost uncanny precision.

As it happens, my own gaze tends to linger on portraits and landscapes that produce a specific unease, the shadow amongst summer trees, the figure glimpsed at the edge of a landscape, the beautiful thing with something occluded at its center. Limmen builds entire worlds from exactly this trembling, tenebrous material, and inhabits them with solemn reverence and indefatigable devotion.

Limmen’s visual vocabulary is immediately recognizable. Dusk light, deep and livid. Candlelight guttering against absolute dark. The ash and pewter of deep winter. Gothic spires piercing a roiling dark that resolves, on closer looking, into a thousand wings. Skeletal trees reaching into skies so dramatically violet they read as verdict rather than weather.

Stone and shadow, iron and fog, the overgrown gate with ivy reclaiming its archway, the castle glimpsed through a cloud of birds at twilight. Her settings carry the same weight and intention as any figure she places within them, as present and purposeful, as steeped in the work of the image. You are always, unmistakably, somewhere in Limmen’s midnight country.

Nearly every image Limmen makes is poised at the edge of something. The ghostly figure on the staircase landing, five candles held aloft, neither ascending nor descending, the darkness above and below equally absolute. The dancing figures in an open field beneath a sky gone the color of cold embers, mid-movement, mid-ritual, caught in a moment that feels both ancient and unfinished. The castle swallowed by dusk, its towers readable only as interruptions in the dark, secretive and permanent and sealed.

Her world exists in this suspended state permanently, always on the verge of some disclosure that never quite arrives. The haze and sediment of her darkroom sorcery holds the tension in place, the veil of her process keeping each image at precisely the distance where mystery remains intact.

The figures who move through Limmen’s photographs are not drawn from the sweeter registers of fantasy. Witches bearing torches, wresting the fire from the hands that once burned them. Vampires and succubi baring fangs, wings aloft, their power radiant and hypnotic and terrifyingly gorgeous. The exiled queen. The witch of the wood. The horned figure on the dune, blade in hand, commanding a landscape that receives her without question.

These archetypes have spent centuries as cautionary tales, as monsters, as the one must escape or defeat. In Limmen’s hands they are are feral and free and fully realized. She photographs them the way you would photograph anyone fully at home in their own skin, which is to say, with total and unselfconscious ease. The dark feminine here is simply sovereign. Ancient and absolute.

“When Night Comes” its brooding Gothic towers and swarming bats suspended against a sky of inky damsons, fresh figs on inky velvet, of violet-studded plum, is the image I included in The Art of Darkness, though I had been following Limmen’s work for years before that, summoned to it time and again with the insistence of a sentiment that speaks directly to the parts of my heart that live in the dark.

She has described her work as visual love letters to the night, and I have yet to encounter a more honest or more beautiful accounting of what she makes. Limmen has spent years in devoted correspondence with the dark, and her photographs are the proof of that fidelity: dispatches from a profoundly haunted kingdom that has perhaps begun to dream of her in return.

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The new Wuthering Heights adaptation seems to be generating a frenzied onslaught of overblown responses. Early reviewers are calling it “lust worthy,” a “god-tier new classic,” a “beautiful mess of passion, destruction, lust, revenge, and unhinged behaviour,” praise that swells toward “explosive toxic desire.” The words weirdly float free of the thing itself; the reviewers can’t say what happens, so they’re throwing adjectives into the void, doing the best they can within the constraints of all they can’t yet say.

As I’m digesting this, thinking through this hyped-yet-hollow praise that lacks the substance to anchor it, I find myself returning to an image I featured in The Art of Darkness: Laurie Lee Brom‘s Cathy’s Ghost. Brom’s vision carries a somber intensity entirely free of sensationalism. When you stand before Cathy’s Ghost, you encounter a woman behind the diamond-patterned pane of an impregnable old window, her eerie luminosity against the gloom. Frost or mist obscures her form, yet she remains visible, more visible perhaps for the obstruction. Her gaze is piercing, direct, and the weight of that presence settles into you. Trapped behind glass. Held at the threshold between worlds.

Whether Laurie Lee Brom is painting a literary ghost or a woman in a 1960s kitchen, a figure contemplating a crystal ball, or a woman smoking behind rain-streaked glass, you don’t know what any of them are thinking. And yes, I’m aware of how that sounds. The unknowable woman. The eternal feminine mystery.  Etc, etc. But really, who knows anyone, anyway? Here we’re looking at women who exist in their own right. Solid and real, not a projection, not a mystery to be solved, not invented to satisfy your desire.

In Cathy’s Ghost, that solidity is what terrifies me. Her gaze cuts through the frost. Her fingertips press into the glass in a way that makes it feel insubstantial, like it’s yielding to her. She’s looking straight at you, and you have no idea what she wants, what she’s capable of. The glass between us feels like the only thing keeping me safe…except I’m not even sure it’s doing that. Maybe I’m fucked anyway. Maybe she’s getting me regardless.

In some of these paintings, the women occupy the edges of ordinary domestic life. A woman in a groovy psychedelic dress, vivid with orange and green and neon pink, standing behind rain-streaked glass. Another smokes a cigarette, bouffant insouciant, looking for all the world as if she’s about to meet her lover, Casanova Don Draper. A third gazes downward at a spider suspended on its web, her bright blue eyeshadow catching the light.

They could be contemplating the texture of their own existence, or they could be thinking about what’s for dinner, or the way their underwear is cutting into their bum, or an Alice in Chains song stuck on loop in their head, the one they’ve rewritten so it’s about their yappy dog now, “yeahhhh she wants to bite the roofers, oh yeahhhhh.” Brom doesn’t tell you which. She just paints them there, solid and present, their interior worlds as dense and unreachable as Cathy’s behind frosted glass. The settings are ordinary. The interiority is not.

Elsewhere in Brom’s work, she loads her women up with supernatural flair and costumes them in excess within a brooding, fantastical atmosphere. Vines and branches crown their heads, flowers cluster and wind through hair, ghostly hands reach from shadows, peacock feathers and stars and crescent moons adorn them. Gold and crimson and cobalt saturate the fabric.  It’s lush and dark at once—ornamental but eerie, decorated but shadowed. Every surface blooms with magic and strangeness.

Their eyes roll upward, turning inward the way you do when you’re contemplating deeply, searching your heart, taxing your memory, listening to your gut. Lost in your head. As these figures seem to be lost in theirs. All that ornamentation surrounding them can’t hold a candle to the landscape of their own thoughts, the interior worlds that exist only for them.

Brom portrays women’s interiority as constant and irreducible across all aesthetic registers. Whether she dresses them in gothic finery, domestic ordinariness, or fantastical excess, the core is always the same: a woman who is present, conscious, thinking, and fundamentally unknowable to us. This unknowability isn’t mystique. And maybe this isn’t about women’s mystery. It’s simply the human condition, the basic fact of human consciousness: private, impossible to fully reach. After all, no one can ever fully know what’s happening inside another person’s head.

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When I was writing The Art of the Occult, I wanted to balance the inherited iconography and established visual language of Western esotericism with work that felt genuinely outside that vocabulary. Alison Blickle was one of those voices.

What struck me immediately was a sumptuous fashion editorial sensibility threading through ritual and ceremony. Women in carefully composed spaces, draped in patterned garments, surrounded by carved faces and vessels, and sculptural forms. Gold, jewel tones, intricate patterns catching light. Textile with actual weight and drape.

Her rendering gives you access to their consciousness. You read them as thinking, feeling beings, not as symbols or poses. These rituals carry the visual richness usually reserved for haute couture or classical painting. The paintings hold actual movement, light, shifting bodies, gestures between the women, something being passed or witnessed. Something shifting.

I’ve been watching her work shift ever since.

In the years that followed, her work deepened into that mythology, but something shifted in the temperature. The rituals became aggressive. The women gathered not just in ceremony, but in violence—explicit, visceral. Time’s Up shows a man with a razor at his throat, women surrounding him, their hands on him, documenting it. Not metaphorical or ambiguous. The violence is right there on the canvas.

Then Medusa. The aggression continues, but the weapon changes. A phone. Women arranged around the figure holding it, their presence itself becoming the instrument. The image becomes what dismantles. There’s a momentum building through these works, ritualistic, violent, mediated, destruction through curation. And somewhere in that accumulation, it felt like something was reaching its limit. A saturation of sorts. Like the conversation had said what it needed to say.

And then the work changed again.

Blickle now imagines a world where nature has gone extinct. Beautiful, metallic-clad figures, uncanny robo-ladies and virtual reality Franken-people step into artificial digital landscapes. They’ve never encountered the natural world, and perhaps they’re even constructed in a way that prevents them from fully accessing or experiencing it, real or not.

Are the glittery tears because they are totally overcome with the everythingness of it, or do they fall because the longing for transcendence is unsatisfied, in the presence of what they’ve been seeking, yet estranged from it? Here is the possibility of a whole different kind of world, a whole different relation to it. But is that even possible for them?

If my thoughts sound scattered here, contradictory, jumping between different observations, it’s because Blickle’s work doesn’t summarize neatly for me. With some artists I can feel the vision immediately and explain it in a few sentences. But hers keeps moving. Each phase offers something different. The rituals, the violence, the estrangement. The same impulse appears throughout: transformation, reaching toward something. But the vision changes so radically that you can’t just say what it “is.”

And maybe that’s kinda the point. The whole thing, the making, the looking, the living with art. Real work moves, it lives. Being alive, it changes. Not exactly the work itself, but the fact that following an artist through real transformation means you’re always catching up. Never quite pinning it down.

To make the same work over and over, the work that was working, that work that people understood…I think perhaps that’s how your vision begins to die. Not dramatically or with great fanfare; it just gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing alive in it anymore. Blickle doesn’t allow for that to happen. She moves on. Releases what she’s done with after she’s given voice to it, wrung the truth from it, explored it to its limits.

Because the alternative is a slow suffocation, a fossilization, a turning to stone. There’s no staying still. That’s what Blickle’s work insists on. That’s what she’s made me see. Evolve or die. Make some goddamn art about it.

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When I was planning the final page layouts for The Art of Fantasy, I had a specific vision in mind. The chapter in question (and I thought the perfect one to end with) is titled How To Save The World, and I imagined it full of heroes, those paragons and protectors, carrying out their dynamic deeds and performing extraordinary feats.

Whether via the gravitas of a work of classical art, a fate fixed immovably in the sculpt of a stone, or in the contemporary mythology of the pages of a comic book, we identify with characters and archetypes that strive for greatness, we grow as they grow, and through them we see the potential for change in ourselves and the world around us. The fact that practically every culture has stories of heroes is very telling about the collective mindset of us humans as a whole – that the hope for and existence of a hero satisfies something deeply held within us.

The emergence of these champions, how they evolve and grow and inspire us along the way, the completion of their story – and the belief that it could be our story too, we could be heroes! – fulfills an emotional need that everyone of us clings to.

The mainstays and conventional heroes are all there. What interested me most, though, was exploring visuals that challenged the familiar narrative of what heroism looks like.

On the second-to-last page, Tino Rodriguez answered that call with color and growth, with flowers blooming from blood, with transformation and healing made visible. His answer was jubilant.

But on the opposite page, on the final page, is Andy Kehoe.

Andy Kehoe’s forests are a different world. Darker and stranger. His creatures inhabit midnight landscapes rendered in deep blues and purples, shadows that are not empty but full of presence. And woven through that darkness: kaleidoscopic color. Feverish sunsets and neon black-light eclipses. Moss-green rocks and plum velvet hilltops and periwinkle mists.

Luminous skies of swirling celestial pageantry, heralding impending destruction, creation, revelation! The beauty is eerie, unsettling, living alongside the darkness. Those sunsets are radiant and infinite, but the forests are still haunted.

His figures are small, impossibly small, against this grandeur. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in pairs, two figures standing together in the face of something vast and unknowable, witnessing together what neither could face alone.

Kehoe builds a persistent forest-world across his pieces, a mythology hushed and wild, that grows and deepens. You encounter recurring motifs and figures across canvases, as if you’ve wandered into a world with complete lives beyond the frame.  It’s not illustrating a fixed story. It’s creating a space where you could emotionally live, where you recognize yourself in their smallness and solitude.

The tension between the creature’s gentle rendering and the emotional gravity of what they’re experiencing—I believe that’s where the essence of the work lives.  Between sorrow and terror and wonder, occupying the same moment.

If you do a bit of digging on the internet, you can learn the conventional details of Kehoe’s life and studies. But I prefer his version. According to him, he was raised by iguanas on the Galapagos Islands after his merchant father was killed by pirates. He was a forest demon in Romania with a beloved beetle farm. A horse brigand in Dublin.  The stories we tell about ourselves shape the worlds we inhabit. And so his paintings are real in the same way his origin story is real: emotionally true, spiritually resonant, more authentic than fact.

“Prismatic Goth,” he calls himself. When you look at his paintings, you see what he means. The midnight forests glow. Shadows are full and luminous. A cosmic sky breaks into infinite color, illuminating landscapes both devastating and wondrous.

You enter these forests seeking something you couldn’t name, but have always hoped in your heart, and you find it there: recognition that others have inhabited this same space, standing in the light and the darkness simultaneously, holding both. And this recognition matters profoundly because it assures something true about what it means to exist, to witness, to stand present to both the beautiful and the desolate without flinching.

Not conquering or overcoming or winning. Just this: I’m here. I see you. I’m standing beside you, tiny and trembling, in the face of the annihilating…and that it’s the being here that matters.

This is what drew me to place his work on that final page. The creatures in his forests are heroes not because they overcome anything, but because they remain present to both the light and the darkness, to their own vulnerability and the vastness surrounding them. They see and are seen. They persist in a world that’s beautiful and indifferent. And they do it without armor, without pretense, just with the quiet awareness of their own small existence in something much larger.

What does heroism look like when you strip away spectacle? What does it mean to save a world when saving involves simply bearing witness, standing present?

I keep coming back to one of my favorite quotes in cinema: “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee. Here, at the end of all things.”

Kehoe’s paintings conjure this for me—creatures carrying the weight of loss and darkness, standing in light they didn’t create and can’t control, present to it anyway. Small, brave acts of witness that you are glad to be part of.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Now that I’ve spent December celebrating everyone else’s books, it seems only fair to mention my own. There are still a few shopping days before the holiday, though I can’t guarantee anything will reach you in time.

But if you’re shopping for friends who trace sigils in the margins and dream in symbols, the family member who gets lost in museum rooms for hours, who collect visual obsessions like other people collect recipes, or if that person is absolutely, unquestionably you sitting there right now thinking “yes, actually, I do deserve something gorgeous and weird that rewards endless returns”—here’s my trilogy.

The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic is where sacred geometry meets spirit art, where witches conjure alongside alchemists, where astrology and Kabbalah and ceremonial magic all get their visual due. Over 175 artworks spanning centuries, organized into The Cosmos, Higher Beings, and Practitioners. Artists driven by that soul-deep hunger to reveal hidden truths, to make the invisible visible, to show us the secret shapes underlying everything. Essential for tarot readers and Hermetic scholars, for anyone who’s ever traced a sigil or stared into a crystal ball, for those building occult study curriculums or simply hungry for imagery that transcends the ordinary and reaches for something vast and glimmering and strange.

The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre is nightmares and plagues, mourning art and murder ballads, the monstrous feminine and supernatural beings, memento mori and existential dread. Artists who understood that darkness carries weight and beauty, that our shadows deserve attention, that facing our demons might actually comfort us. Over 200 artworks across centuries asking: why are we drawn to the macabre? What happens when we stop denying our darkness and start reveling in it? Essential for Gothic souls and Victorian mourning enthusiasts, for anyone who’s ever felt more at home in graveyards than crowds, for those who understand that beauty and horror often share the same face.

The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal is beasts and forgotten realms, myth and impossible landscapes, artists building entire worlds from imagination alone. Dragons and wonderlands, magic and philosophy, hope made visible through paint and illustration. Fantasy isn’t escape—it’s that irresistible impulse toward wonder, that refusal to accept reality as the only option, that hunger for what could be. Essential for worldbuilders and folklore scholars, for anyone who’s ever needed to see how you make the impossible feel real, for those who understand that imaginary worlds deserve our fiercest attention and deepest study.

You can find these wherever books are sold, or order signed copies from me directly. I can’t promise they’ll arrive in time for your Hexmas gifting needs as the postal gods remain mysterious and unknowable, but I promise to get them in the mail today. Receiving a book in January when you’ve half-forgotten you ordered it feels like a gift from your past self anyway—an extended holiday, a little magic arriving precisely when January gets bleak, and you need it most.

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My second book, The Art of Darkness, now has a German-language edition: Die Kunst Des DUNKLEN.

Wow. That title goes so hard. And it looks like they changed the cover art to now feature John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, TAKE THESE SNAKES MOTHERFUCKER!

Ok, but for real, it’s “Orestes Pursued by the Furies,” and it certainly makes for an intense initial impression!

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