Unquiet
Things

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.

✥ 2 comments

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.

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?

✥ 1 comment

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.

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?

✥ comment

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.

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?

✥ 1 comment

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.

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?

✥ comment

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?

✥ comment

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.

✥ comment

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!

✥ comment

When you stand before one of Chie Yoshii‘s paintings, you might notice the technical mastery first—that jewel-like luminosity built up through countless translucent glazes on wood panel, each layer deepening the richness until gold leaf seems to glow beneath skin, until fabric appears soft enough to touch. Every thread is visible, every feather meticulously rendered. It’s a technique inherited from the Flemish masters, requiring patience and precision. The attentiveness  to the process is such that you could almost smell the fragrance of the painting (and if her art were perfume, I think it might have notes of whipped orange blossom honey, pomegranate flower smoke, and petitgrain, neroli’s bitter, greener cousin, sweet and dark and verdant all at once.)

But then your attention and your appreciation shifts the longer your gaze lingers upon the canvas. A woman with a lion cub pressed against her cheek gazes downward. A fox perches on an armored shoulder, both human and animal staring forward with identical intensity. A unicorn leans its head on a woman’s shoulder in water so blue it seems to glow. You begin to realize these seem less like portraits of dominion or allegory, more like moments of profound communion.

This quality—this sense of communion between human and animal—drew me to include Yoshii’s work in The Art of Fantasy, alongside other contemporary artists who explore the spaces between human and animal, real and imagined. In my caption for her painting Hemera, I wrote: “The artist often features animal companions in her works, from the mundane and many-legged to the fantastical winged and scaled variety, and whose appearance suggests companionship and camaraderie rather than danger or menace, or, on the other end of the spectrum, mere pet ownership.”

“Painting for me is ‘participation mystique,'” Yoshii has explained. “It is not about reality, but about the fantasies aroused by its effects. They are viscerally conceived and more tangible than reality.”

Participation mystique describes a state where the boundary between self and other becomes porous, where one participates mystically in the life of another being. Beautiful and unsettling, this dissolution of separateness, an experience of depth and power. Perhaps you cannot rush into such a state. Perhaps it requires the same quality of patience and presence that Yoshii brings to her panels, building up color through repeated application of thin glazes, each layer a small act of faith that the accumulated whole will eventually reveal what needs to be seen. What develops between her figures, woman and wolf, woman and owl, woman and lion cub, is a secret language of history between two beings, spoken without words, understood without translation.

A deep sense of reverence permeates Yoshii’s work, visible in every corner of her compositions. She paints with exquisite exactitude. A butterfly hovering at the edge of the frame receives the same meticulous attention as the face at its center. A cluster of berries is rendered with the same care as a crown. Every petal, every strand of hair, every individual feather—nothing is disposable, nothing hurried. This isn’t technical skill alone, though the skill is undeniable. It’s a quality of respect for the work itself, for the time it takes, for each element that comprises the whole. You can feel it when you stand before these paintings: you’re in the presence of work made with deep care.

Yellow butterflies scatter across compositions, landing on bare skin, hovering near feathered companions, perpetually transforming between one form and another. A woman submerged in brilliant blue water shares that water with a white unicorn, surrounded by tall grasses and white lilies, each blade of grass, each lily petal given its due. Dense dark foliage creates sanctuary around them. A celestial creature stands on a tree branch surrounded by cascading purple wisteria, her light blue wings spread wide, her peacock-patterned tail feathers transitioning from blue to green in elaborate eye-marked plumage—each eye-spot on each feather carefully observed and rendered. She appears entirely at home in her hybrid nature, neither fully human nor fully bird but both at once.

A woman rests in flowing white, and on her hands sits a small winged creature with a jewel-encrusted collar, part mammal, part fantasy. Red drapery and pink roses glow behind them, each fold of fabric, each rose petal attended to. Her expression is utterly peaceful, her breathing synchronized with this strange companion.

The women gaze downward or close their eyes entirely, turned inward to some shared interior space. Large ornate antlers curve upward from serene faces, adorned with blue and purple flowers woven through their branches, clusters of bright red berries, white lilies blooming where throat meets collarbone. The antlers, traditionally the stag’s, the hunter’s trophy, become a framework for flowers, the boundary between human skull and animal bone no longer fixed or certain.

“I stare at the darkness in my mind and images slowly float up,” Yoshii has said of her process. The concept or interpretation comes later, sometimes only after the painting is finished. You cannot force the unconscious to yield its images on demand. You can only create the conditions: the patience, the stillness, the quality of attention…and wait for what surfaces. She channels myths, allowing archetypal forms to surface from what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Just as bees know instinctively how to dance, she suggests, we all carry within us inherited images, patterns imprinted in the substrate of human consciousness long before we learned to articulate them in language. Jung wrote that mythology is filled with symbols that echo archetypes in our minds because it was itself inspired by those archetypes. We inherit these images, patterns, and forms that surface across cultures and centuries because they speak to something fundamental in human psychology. Her paintings exist in these resonant frequencies, moments between souls.

An entity sits enthroned on dark swirling clouds, crowned with elaborate headdresses swirling in invisible winds, pouring golden grains endlessly from her hands while geese circle through a moody sky. The extravagant contrasts between near-black shadow and luminous flesh create theatrical drama, but Yoshii’s figures emerge from darkness into light, existing comfortably in both. Jung wrote that everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes. In Yoshii’s work, the shadows receive as much careful attention as the light, both necessary, both honored.

This year saw the publication of Dreams, Yoshii’s first major monograph—200 pages collecting over a decade of paintings alongside essays, enlarged details, and text in both English and Japanese.  It’s the kind of book you want to touch, to turn pages slowly, to return to again and again. The kind of object that deserves a place on your winter solstice wish list, though fair warning: once you bring it home, you may find yourself reluctant to wrap it for anyone else.

And perhaps that’s the point! To return, to sit with these images, to let them work on you slowly. The women in Yoshii’s paintings exist without explanation, crowned and adorned, accompanied and embraced. The more time you spend with them, the more you notice: another flower hidden in shadow, the way an animal’s gaze mirrors its human companion’s, the quiet revelations that accumulate in the luminous space between their closed eyes and resting heads, between the darkness behind them and the light that illuminates their faces. There, we might glimpse our own reflection, animal and human both, inseparable.

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

✥ 3 comments

I had a conversation recently with a marketing and brand strategist whose work I genuinely admire. I reached out because I’ve been watching authors and creators in my orbit work with her, and the results are absolutely freaking gorgeous. Thoughtful, strategic, and clearly effective. I came to the conversation thinking I knew what I needed help with, but I left feeling deeply unsettled.

My main takeaway, at least initially, was that the problem was me. That I was getting in my own way. That my resistance to certain language and frameworks—”content creator,” “personal brand,” “monetizing my platform”—was holding me back from turning what I do into a sustainable income. That if I wanted people to take me seriously, to move beyond “hobby” into “career,” I needed to start thinking differently about all of it.

It freaked me out. A lot!!!

But after a day of sitting with the discomfort, I realized the problem wasn’t me, and it wasn’t her either. The problem was that I muddied the conversation by bringing up everything I do….my books, my perfume writing, my Patreon, my blog, my day job that won’t last forever…and accidentally framed it all as a question about comprehensive monetization when what I actually needed was much more specific.

Here’s what I should have said from the beginning: I need my books to sell better.

Not “I need to monetize everything I create.” Not “I need to build multiple revenue streams.” Not “I need to charge brands for perfume reviews.” I need the books—three published in my Art in the Margins series, with a fourth on the way—to reach more people. I need the audience I’ve spent over twenty years cultivating to understand that these books are where my work lives most fully. And when my day job eventually ends, I need book sales to be a meaningful part of my income. That’s it. That’s the actual problem.

But I guess that’s where things get complicated. When you go looking for help with visibility and sales, you often get handed a complete toolkit: personal branding, content strategy, monetization frameworks, influence-building tactics. And embedded in that toolkit is a false choice:
Either you stay small, keep it as a “hobby,” remain invisible and unsuccessful—or you embrace the full apparatus of modern creator culture. Monetize everything. Think of yourself as a brand. Turn every piece of writing, every bit of expertise, every fragment of your creative practice into a potential revenue stream.

Those feel like the only two options. But they’re not, right?! That can’t be it!

I write about perfume for my Patreon, Midnight Stinks. My patrons get the deeply personal reviews, the first glimpses, the sneak peeks before I share things with the rest of the world. They also get scented notecards from me every month. It’s intimate, reciprocal, and appropriately monetized for what it is—a creative practice I want to sustain without compromising its nature.

What I don’t want to do is charge brands $5,000 for a sponsored post where I say something smells “like, so bomb” and call it a day. I see influencers do this, and that’s a completely legitimate business model for people building that kind of platform. But it has nothing to do with the kind of writing I do or want to do. Turning my perfume writing into billable brand partnerships would fundamentally change what it is—and I don’t want that. When the consultant suggested exploring that revenue stream, she wasn’t wrong. For someone building an influencer business around fragrance, that’s exactly the right advice. But I’m not building that business. I’m a writer who happens to write about perfume as part of a broader creative ecosystem.

So here’s what I’m actually trying to solve: How do I make sure the audience I’ve cultivated over 20+ years—people who follow Unquiet Things for the art, the horror, the perfume, the darkly beautiful cultural ephemera—understands that my books are the primary work? How do I reach new people who would love these books but don’t know they exist? This isn’t about becoming a brand or monetizing everything. It’s about making the books more visible within the world I’ve already built, in ways that feel authentic to that world.

The consultant asked good questions. She gave thoughtful, professional advice based on what she heard from me. The disconnect happened because I came in talking about sustainability and multiple income streams, which naturally sounds like “I need to diversify and monetize my creative output.” But what I actually meant was: “My day job is temporary, and when it ends, I need my books to be selling well enough to matter. Everything else can stay exactly as it is.” Those are very different problems requiring very different solutions.

The conversation was valuable, though, because it forced me to articulate what I actually need…and just as importantly, what I don’t need. I don’t need to hustle in ways that feel gross. I don’t need to perform a version of myself that isn’t true. I don’t need to turn every creative practice into a revenue stream.

I need to talk about my books more. I need to make it clearer that they’re The Thing. I need to build better pathways between all the things I share and the books that come from the same place.

I’m going to work through the materials the consultant sent me. I’m going to talk to other authors who’ve worked with her. And I’m going to stay open to the possibility that there’s a way to work together that serves what I actually need: not the comprehensive brand-building package, but the specific question of book visibility.

But I’m also realizing something else: maybe one of my mistakes was framing this as a branding problem in the first place. Maybe what I actually need isn’t a marketing/brand consultant (or at least, not only a marketing consultant.) Maybe I need to be talking more with other writers and creators who are doing similar work. People who got similar speeches about selling more and turning everything into income, and who struggled with whether to listen. People who create beautiful work around their books and somehow manage to keep them central without losing the expansiveness that makes their work interesting. People who are navigating this same tension between wanting their work to reach people and refusing to perform a version of success that feels hollow.

Maybe we should be having regular conversations (working calls, even! GASP!) where we bolster each other, share what’s actually working (not what the marketing industrial complex says should work), and remind each other that we’re allowed to do this our own way.

Because here’s what I know: I am an author! I have written three books with another on the way! And dangit, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about them! Not because I’ve embraced “being a brand” or overcome my stubbornness or learned to monetize everything. But because these books deserve to be read, and I deserve to claim the work I’ve already done.

I just need to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I’m performing someone else’s version of success. And maybe (probably?) I need to do that in conversation with other people who are asking the same questions.

If that’s you, let’s talk.

✥ 10 comments