categories: art
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What happens when you take the aesthetic of stumbling upon mysterious photographs in dust-thick, cobwebbed abandoned attics, combine it with the somewhat eccentric but actually quite sensible wisdom of consulting Magic 8-Balls for creative guidance, and add a stuffed companion who contributes the shadowy elements to this artistic collaboration? You enter the bewitchingly strange artistic universe of Benz and Chang, where watercolor and walnut ink conspire to create “fake vintage photos” that feel like they’ve been haunting antique shop frames since 1923, patiently waiting for someone to discover their secrets.
Each painting operates as a visual puzzle that reveals its supernatural elements only after prolonged viewing – the ghost limbs, the doubled reflections, the figures caught perpetually between looking forward and glancing back over their shoulders like they’re trying to keep track of all their simultaneous lives.
Benz creates work that captures the particular brand of sustained strangeness we all live through at some point – those changes that feel permanent but stubbornly resist normalcy, like psychological double exposures where past and present occupy the same frame. His paintings emerge from a practice that balances intuitive channeling with deliberate misdirection, where seeing something that belongs in a painting means adding it, consequences be damned.
Sometimes the collective unconscious speaks in riddles, and sometimes it speaks through an oracular toy suggesting you add more mysterious doubling to your Gothic tableau, or perhaps another ghost limb hovering at the edge of the frame. This is an artist who listens to both voices with equal attention, creating paintings that feel less like artistic inventions and more like recovered documents from a parallel timeline where the supernatural seeps with subtle mystery into everyday life – proof that make-believe, when rendered with care and conviction, transforms into its own kind of truth.
Unquiet Things: Your partnership with Chang – a stuffed cat who “supplies the dark”- feels like its own kind of evocative narrative. How has this fictional collaboration influenced your approach to duality in your work, particularly in exploring the boundaries between real and imagined?
Benz and Chang: When I started the Benz and Chang paintings, I wanted to make fake vintage photographs. Just like as if you were in an antique shop or the attic of an abandoned house and stumbled across a beautiful and haunting photo in a frame. I wanted to make paintings like that, and this is why I use actual vintage frames from antique shops to frame my work. I decided that, in order to paint make-believe vintage photos, it would help to have a make-believe photography studio partner. I say Mr. Chang supplies the dark because it’s absurd and also maybe true. He has the ability to traverse between the earthly realm and the underworld.
Your work explores deeply personal moments of transformation – fear, grief, mystical encounters, mortality. What draws you to express these profound human transitions through the language of shadow and reverie, the supernatural and surreal? How does the ghostly aesthetic of early 20th-century photography help you capture these moments of the liminal and the ethereal?
I work intuitively, and if I can get anywhere near the collective subconscious, I feel like I’m succeeding. I’m also usually working something out from my own life. To tap into the collective subconscious, I prefer using make-believe, nonsense, and pretend. I think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland makes a good example of this. We can all relate to falling down a rabbit hole these days.
Or, on a deep emotional level, we can all relate to being too big and too small. I think one of the enduring qualities of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a portrayal of the universal human experience, abstracted by a thick layer of nonsense, make-believe, and pretend. I think that using early 20th Century imagery adds a level of obscurity in that is Other. It’s another time, another place, a culture we like to think we understand, but which is still very foreign. It naturally occults and mythologizes. I also just like old things. I like old things just because they’re old.
The use of a Magic 8-Ball as an artistic oracle is intriguing. Could you elaborate on how this method of inviting chance into your creative process began? In what ways does this approach of randomness and uncertainty shape the dreamlike qualities that permeate your work.
I started working with the Magic 8-Ball and also coin tosses because I had problems making decisions. It was a tool to help prevent me from getting stuck. Now, I think it contributes to the dreamlike quality of the work by helping me restrain the overwhelming presence of my will. I am constantly fighting my own impulses to Make Sense.
Your paintings reveal different layers of meaning through multiple viewings – what begins with the feeling of peeking at a vintage photograph unfolds to glimmers of strangeness and hushed giggles of a dream-logic absurdity. It gives a sense of impossible deja vu, a feeling of ineffable familiarity juxtaposed with a sort of inevitable unreality, veiled with fanciful melancholy. How intentional is this process of revelation? What interests you about creating works that demand multiple viewings to fully appreciate their complexity?
First off, thank you for being so kind. I feel like you really get the work, and I appreciate that. While I work, my brain does this annoying thing where it’s always racing ahead to build meaning. I’m always intentionally misdirecting and subverting. I like it best if I only have a tenuous hold on what a painting means to me, and very often I’m only chasing a feeling. Most people see my paintings in their very own way, and that’s the way I like it.
Your recent “Changeling” exhibition at Haven Gallery marks an intriguing evolution in your work – especially in your shift from sepia tones to more vivid color. In the show statement, you speak of living multiple lives, both consecutive and simultaneous ones. How did this exploration of multiplicity influence your move toward a more surreal, colorful palette?
I keep being asked about the multiple lives statement, and looking back maybe I should have phrased it differently. I do believe in reincarnation in the Samsara sense, as opposed to the more pop culture speculative sense. But really, I was talking about multiple lives more in the sense of simultaneous lives. When most people talk about leading “multiple lives”, it can get dark. People hiding infidelity, drug use, being sociopaths at work, etc. But in a more normal sense, we all live multiple lives. For me, simultaneously, I am a vaguely successful artist and also a very specific flavor of software architect. I aspire to live a “normal” life, and I am from a different planet. So there is an artist and a technology worker who specializes in creating and maintaining order. There is a person who actually just wants to appear normal in the world, and someone from a different planet.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t look anything like my parents or brother, and people would ask where my copper hair came from. One of my mother’s answers was that they found me in New Mexico, living with a family of rabbits under some bushes. So even in my family mythology, I came from somewhere else. The show title “Changeling” referred to the folk tale sense of a fairy child who has been substituted into a mortal family.
Your “Maybe Not the Norm” exhibition at Riversea Gallery presented such compelling visions of psychological doubling – those conjoined figures on the velvet fainting couch, the figure simultaneously peering around a corner while looking back over their shoulder. How do these moments of divided attention speak to your exploration of permanent change? What drew you to express this contemporary state through these particular Gothic motifs?
More double lives. Double consciousnesses. Making friends with your other lives. There is also a piece in there about reincarnations of Cleopatra, which is one of my favorite things to meditate on, after Mehitabel the cat (from Don Marquis “Archy and Mehitabel”).
Your artist statement mentions early experiences with spirits and hauntings. How has your relationship with supernatural themes evolved alongside your artistic practice?
I’m not sure if I have anything resembling a satisfying answer for this. It’s something I experience, and it’s a part of the way I move through the world. If anything, it’s all only become more mysterious and elusive, instead of making any kind of sense.
Ghost stories seem to transcend cultural boundaries, appearing in narratives worldwide. How does this shared language of the supernatural influence your approach to connecting with viewers? What universal human experiences do you seek to tap into through these spectral imagery?
Ghost stories fascinate us. They are about the persistence of memory. They are a cultural manifestation of our ultimate existential questions. They are a meditation on the relationships between the body, soul, memory, and personality. They haunt, they guide, they instruct, they deliver messages. They are mystery.
Your studio must be such an intriguing space, given the dreamlike nature of your work. What objects, images, or elements surround you while you’re creating? How does your environment influence these haunting images you create?
I have been collecting vintage photos for decades. Mostly I have photos from the early 20th century, but also some from the 1800s. Most of my collection is of people in costumes, photos of mediums, fake ghost photos, and a small collection of silent film celebrities. I particularly collect people in bat and cat costumes.
Also have a really tiny collection of art from various artists. List of artists in the photos:
Jana Seven @rag.and.bone.dolls
Sara Swink @sara.swink.ceramics
Alicia Justus @theamazingjustus
Mister Finch @misterfinchtextiles
Beyond the supernatural elements in your work, what moments or observations in daily life catch your artistic eye?
Old things. I like old things just because they’re old. I like the interiors of old buildings. I like trees and animals (especially cats). I like books to read and also as art objects.
Find Benz and Chang: Website // Instagram
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Artists construct worlds and invite us to enter – but not all of these realms exist in the same dimension of possibility. Some paint shimmering aquatic empires where sea-born royalty holds court among coral spires, others sketch ethereal meadowlands where fairy folk conduct their moonlit parliaments or crystalline metropolises that scrape the bellies of alien clouds.
These brush-wielding conjurers birth pocket universes hidden within dewdrops and volcanic paradises, where phoenix-flame gardens might bloom eternally. Whether bound for territories unmapped or realms beyond discovery, these visual doorways help us abandon reason and dive into the secret chambers of wonder we’ve locked away inside ourselves.
Martina Hoffmann charts entirely different territories – the vast inner cosmos where thought transforms into blazing visions and dreams acquire the weight of sinuous reality. Her painted domains throb with otherworldly enigmas that exist beyond telescopes or diving bells, territories where gossamer wing-forms curve through oceanic depths of perception and feminine archetypes emerge from coiling galaxies of living energy.
Here, landscape constructs itself from pure mind – swirling tentacled vortices of cognition, mandala-patterns forged from solidified meditation, and floating forms where undulating wisdom flows through currents of liquid contemplation. Personal awareness expands into cosmic recognition, every painted detail marking waypoints in the infinite terrain of consciousness knowing itself, of perception awakening to its own vastness.
In her painting The Garden, we step through the looking glass into what Hoffmann calls our “secret garden, where your soul unfolds its wings unhindered and freely.” Here, beneath a pale, radiant orb, twisted trees stretch skyward with the fluid grace of dreams gaining substance, their branches curve into the glowing moonlight as if drawing sustenance from pure illumination, while dense foliage creates canopies of emerald contemplation that pulse with ancient rhythms. Even the shadows here are glossy and glowing, transformed by some alchemical process that turns darkness into another form of light.
A pathway of warm, golden radiance winds through this verdant mindscape, inviting exploration deeper into territories where the familiar laws of botany yield to the stranger logic of inner sight. The blues and greens that saturate this realm become the visible frequencies of tranquility and growth, painted reveries where every leaf carries the weight of revelation and every shadow holds the promise of hidden wisdom waiting to unfold. This becomes the inner sanctuary where, as Hoffmann suggests, we can “safely connect with your inner self and consciousness to ‘in-vision’ your life’s path anew daily.”
The same sinuous energies that curve through these moonlit trees flow throughout Hoffmann’s painted territories, manifesting as the biodiversity of consciousness itself – coiling tentacles that undulate through cosmic depths, ethereal appendages that bend like thoughts given substance, and snake-like forms adorned with phosphorescent patterns. Her explorations deliberately echo the planet’s biological richness, bringing forth what she calls “new varieties” of beings that may exist in undiscovered oceanic depths, or perhaps represent “projections of future species” emerging from our collective unconscious.
Her Universal Woman archetype emerges repeatedly from these swirling forms – sometimes crowned with mandala-like radiances, other times merging directly with the undulating wisdom that seems to carry DNA-level knowledge through her painted domains. The oceanic blues and cellular greens that define The Garden resurface across her work, creating underwater atmospheres where otherworldly enigmas pulse with the rhythm of expanded awareness.
Hoffmann approaches these painted explorations with explicit therapeutic intent. “Paintings may function as mirrors reflecting the individual viewer’s consciousness,” she explains, positioning her work as both personal archaeology and collective healing tool. Her stated mission extends beyond individual transformation to planetary awakening, an attempt “to portray spirit as the one universal force beyond the confines of cultural and religious differences.” Growing up between cultures in Cameroon instilled her early understanding that “there’s only one spirit and one humanness,” a conviction that infuses her artistic practice with social purpose alongside spiritual seeking.
Through her brush, Hoffmann offers us passage into territories that sprawl both within and beyond our familiar borders – painted proof that the most exotic domains we might explore are the infinite landscapes of our own awakening perception. Her philosophical uncertainty enriches these explorations: whether her creatures “truly exist, are yet to manifest in nature, are pure projections of future species, or are part of our collective unconscious” remains an open question she cherishes exploring through art.
In this creative freedom, every spiral and serpent carries us deeper into the mystery of what it means to be conscious in a universe where imagination and reality cross-pollinate each other like wandering comets seeding gardens across stellar nurseries, where undiscovered species might emerge from the depths of both ocean and psyche, and where what is and what might be live and breathe and exist fantastically in symbiotic communion.
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When I write about the artists whose work appears in my books, the focus is usually on showcasing the visual creations themselves. But with Forest Rogers, I find myself equally enchanted by her language. Her words cast spells – quite literally, if we consider Alan Moore’s insight that to spell is to manipulate words, to change consciousness. When Forest writes about “wrestling with devilkins” in her house “like a proper Baba Yaga hut,” or describes a pigeon dancing “a pure call to cast one’s very soul upon the waters,” her prose channels the same otherworldly quality as her sculptures.
Which presents me with a delightful challenge: how do I write about an artist who already expresses herself so beautifully? Forest’s mystical voice feels like incantations emerging from the same mythological realm as her creatures. But we’re going to try anyway, because her sculpture, The Beautiful Crustacean, graces the pages of The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That Is Unreal, and her work deserves deeper exploration.
One gets the sense that Forest Rogers is an artist who has experienced first-hand both the joy and despair of mermaids singing, has felt the euphoric, incandescent flutter of angel wings, held the literal hand of the dark night of the soul, and maybe even danced a tango with a prehistoric skeleton or a luminous beam of starlight. How else would this artist instinctively know how to sculpt the ineffable, the transcendent, the staggeringly unbelievable into such a graceful and dynamic reality?
These creatures, marvels of myth and imagination, monstrously beautiful and tinged with melancholy, seem poised at the verge, a frozen moment of fragile movement – as if they may at any moment take flight and disappear with their secrets into the mist, or skitter close and whisper mysterious revelations. Approach them with care, take only what is offered to you, and let the world go on, knowing that you have experienced a bit of the magic that made them.
Forest’s path to these mythological beings wasn’t direct. For 25 years, she created dinosaur sculptures for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, alongside an eclectic array of commercial projects, but her artistic vision was seeded much earlier. As a child, she spent hours sitting on her grandmother’s floor studying volumes illustrated by Rackham, Nielsen, and Dulac – “I think I’m now digging through the universe for my ideas, just as I was looking for treasure in this house,” she reflects on her blog.
Growing up as the daughter of visionary artist Lou Rogers, Forest learned that art could be both wound and healing, a lesson that infuses her current work. Her creative process now begins with morning observations at a coffee shop, watching pigeons dance while she sketches on tracing paper, contemplating the same subjects repeatedly until they reveal their essential nature. From these loose drawings, she builds each sculpture methodically – first the head to establish identity, then an armature wire framework, gradually filling out the creature until it achieves that ineffable moment of transformation.
This gift for capturing transformation reveals itself across her mythological menagerie. Night Bloom captures a creature suspended between violence and grace, its delicate bat ears framing a face of porcelain serenity even as it holds a moth caught mid-flight at its lips – a dainty dinner frozen in breathless moments before consumption.
The being’s coloring whispers of twilight’s most tender palette: cream and pale salmon, the palest of lilacs, like a sunset with the saturation washed out in the inside of a seashell. Yet for all its predatory purpose, the creature has taken root, its lower body flowing into a plant-like stem that suggests it belongs as much to the garden as to the night sky. Here is hunger made beautiful, the hunt transformed into ballet, a reminder that even the most essential acts of survival can be rendered with exquisite tenderness.
In Winter Siren, Forest presents us with a figure draped in the deepest winter’s palette – plum and midnight blue feathers that seem simultaneously cloak and natural plumage, rimed with a scrim of frost that catches light like captured starshine.
Her pale face gazes cool and quiet with devotion as she holds aloft a golden Venetian mask fashioned as a sunburst. “She holds a mask suggesting the Sun, ever eagerly awaited in the longest winter nights,” Forest explains, and in her gesture we witness the entire drama of seasonal faith – winter personified as keeper of summer’s promise, the siren who sings not of shipwreck but of spring’s eventual return.
Octopoid Descending embodies the elemental pull toward oceanic depths, her tentacles streaming upward as if caught in an invisible current. Rendered in cream and the softest coral shadows, she possesses an expression both serene and formidable – a being wholly of the sea drawn toward her natural element.
Her descent carries the weight of ancient purpose, guiding her toward realms where pressure and darkness hold their own terrible beauty. Her tentacles flow with liquid grace, yet carry the weight of inevitability, as if she bears messages meant only for the deepest trenches.
In Goblin Spider, Forest weaves together folktale and ukiyo-e tradition with her own dark humor – the spider perched as elaborate headdress while a mouse dangles from lips that once might have held silk fabric in classical prints. Where courtesans once conveyed coded desire through delicate tissue, the creature offers rodent prey with the same demure poise. T
The wordplay tickles the mischievous itch in my brain that delights in such things: from moth in mouth to mouse in mouth, Forest creates her own language of captured sustenance. The symmetry speaks to that eternal tension she loves – grace balanced against horror, beauty shadowed by predation, the spider maiden who watches with eyes both human and arachnid, equally capable of seduction and consumption.
Night Sphinx embodies the wistful contemplation of desert nights, her gaze turned skyward toward constellations only she can read. Rendered in blues softened by darkness and touched with subtle gold as if moonlight were burnishing her feathers, she perches upon her pedestal with the patient grace of one who has spent centuries watching the wheel of stars. Her expression carries that particular melancholy of nocturnal guardians – beings who know the secrets whispered between dusk and dawn.
A delicate winding stairway spirals around the base of her pedestal, leading to an entrance far too small for sphinx paws but perfectly sized for the tiny magician who dwells below. She stands sentinel not just over the desert night, but over an entire miniature realm where creatures of different scales share the same moonlit world.
Flemish Moth emerges from transformative slumber, her face blank with the serene stasis of a creature suspended between becoming and being. “Hatched from the Northern Renaissance,” she bears wings that crown her head like an elaborate headdress complete with spiral antennae, while additional wings spread where human arms might rest.
Rendered in the softest pinks, yellows, creams and blues, she suggests something that might have fluttered from the detailed margins of an illuminated manuscript, her pale luminosity recalling the lustrous surfaces masters once achieved with patient oil glazes. A bright orange moth rests at her center, vivid against her dreamy palette, as if marking the spot where metamorphosis concentrates its most vital energies. Her form extends downward in a long moth-tail that ends in a delicate tuft, structured like the lepidoptera she channels, poised in that eternal moment between chrysalis and flight.
I gaze at this sculpture and want to sniff it too. What would a Flemish Moth perfume smell like? What is the fragrance of transformative slumber? Maybe dusty parchment, the powdery residue of ancient wings, pressed flowers between gilded vellum pages, the metallic sweetness of metamorphic silk.
“When I am creative, I realize: ‘This is Love,'” Forest has written, and this devotion permeates every carefully sculpted detail. Her creatures emerge from that same loving attention – beings caught in tender moments of transformation, rendered with the kind of patience that only deep affection allows. Each figure seems to hold knowledge born from their suspended state, as if their eternal pause between becoming has given them time to gather wisdom from both sides of transformation. What whispered revelations might they offer?
Perhaps the Winter Siren knows how to hold hope through the darkest months, while the Night Sphinx has memorized the true names of every star. The Goblin Spider might teach us about the duality that exists within us all, and the Flemish Moth could reveal how to sleep through our own metamorphosis without losing ourselves entirely. The Night Bloom understands the delicate balance between survival and grace, while the Octopoid Descending carries knowledge of what treasures wait in the deepest places we fear to explore. Forest’s work echoes ancient wisdom about transformation, a recognition that becoming requires both death and birth, that the spaces between are where magic gathers and essential truths dwell. Her creatures remind us that we, too, might be poised at the verge between what we were and what we might become.
Below waits an assembly of further enchantments, each a testament to Forest’s gift for seeing what mysteries live at the threshold, for coaxing them forth and offering them form.
Find Forest Rogers: Website // Instagram
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A pale face emerges from a writhing, slithering mass of beetles and larvae, yet Jana Heidersdorf’s macabre portrait mesmerizes, not disturbs. In her cover art for the gothic metal project Wurmpalast, inspired by Poe’s Ligeia, insects arrange themselves into baroque adornments around serene features while a lone specimen makes its pilgrimage across her lips. The beetles become ornamental headdress transforming infestation into coronation. Decomposition, but make it elegant devastation.
When I was curating The Art of Darkness and later, The Art of Fantasy, Jana’s work found its way into both collections. She finds genuine beauty in traditionally unsettling imagery and tenderness in decay. Her approach to the darker things feels emotionally vulnerable rather than gratuitous or manufactured for shock.
Consider her mermaids, which she’s created by the dozens. The Queen of Eels pulses with inner light in crushing ocean depths, her elongated form more alien than human, while serpentine creatures coil around her in devoted attendance. She commands these deep-sea dwellers through presence alone. Jana paints underwater realms in midnight blues and greens where strange creatures generate their own light. Her mermaids feel genuinely otherworldly and more than a little terrifying, closer to what such beings might actually be if they ruled kingdoms we can’t fathom.
Her fairy tale reimaginings reveal similar subversive instincts. In “Wolfwood,” the beast has grown large enough to encompass entire forests within its dark fur, each strand housing shadowed trees and hidden paths. His luminous eyes burn like twin moons above a tiny figure in red…but this isn’t the cowering child of familiar stories. She stands her ground in the starlit clearing, neither fleeing nor advancing, her posture suggesting curiosity and wonder rather than fear; she’s genuinely interested in this encounter. The blue-gray mist shrouding the trees gives it a dreamlike quality, and we’re not sure if this is a nightmare, but we’re also not afraid to find out.
There’s a ritualistic quality to many of her pieces that speaks to deeper mythologies. “Dreambird” captures a covenant sealed in crimson, not violence but offering, as a small brown bird pierces a ghostly palm in one clean swoop. Each feather rendered with medieval manuscript devotion, the creature becomes both communion wafer and consecrating priest. The blood that wells speaks not of wound but willing sacrifice, each ruby drop a prayer offered up. Against mottled jade darkness, the pale hand becomes altar, the bird transformed from woodland creature into mystical messenger.
“Spider’s Cradle” continues this theme of sacred exchange. Death extends jewelry with a grandmother’s care, skeletal fingers cradling web-work as if spun from moonbeams. Each dewdrop caught in the strands gleams like baroque pearls while a white spider bears a ruby birthmark – the crimson sigil of small sovereignty. The phantom face veiled in green shadows suggests inheritance rather than transaction, ancient wisdom passed from bone to the eight-legged makers of delicate snares.
Not everything dwells in shadow. In “Apparition,” the night sky’s dreams of swans takes wing in luminescent clouds. The ethereal bird materializes from stardust, its form shifting between solid grace and celestial vapor as it glides through velvet darkness. Below, a solitary figure witnesses from their balcony – summoner or blessed observer, we can’t tell. It’s the artist at her most hopeful, yet mystery persists even in gentler visions.
Her book cover work demonstrates how these sensibilities translate to commercial projects. For Don’t Let the Forest In, a formal portrait fissures along organic lines as wild roses and thorned branches spill through tears in the photographic surface. A pale butterfly settles among the chaos. A crimson stain spots a collar. Violence and fragility. Blood and wings.
“Tears,” created for Month of Fear 2018, captures a nocturnal being that could be timeless elemental spirit or simply someone out past their bedtime. The question hovers in wide, unblinking eyes – one of which nestles a tiny white spider like a glowing moonstone. What slumbering spirits is she communing with? What midnight magics is she calling forth?
In “Make a Devil Out of Me,” elongated fingers curve into a shape that could be horns – or is it just the way pale hands twist in darkness? Each fingertip sharpens to wicked points while rose vines coil around bone-thin digits. Above, lurid red eyes glower from shadows. Are we seeing transformation, or just the power of suggestion? The pose suggests both invitation and challenge – someone who already feels monstrous finally showing us what they see in the mirror.
Jana finds the sacred in decay, the tender in transformation. Her creatures don’t exist to frighten but to reveal something true about change, about how what we fear might actually offer gifts, how the grotesque can reveal hidden forms of grace, how what repels and disturbs us, what we instinctively avoid might be precisely what we need to see. Through her art, Jana proposes that wisdom often wears frightening masks, that beauty and horror might be closer companions than we’d like to admit. That perhaps our discomfort is a compass, pointing toward the truths we’re not yet ready to face but desperately need to find. That change isn’t something to endure but something to embrace, that our deepest growth might come from the very deepest, darkest places.
Below are a few more of my favorites among the dispatches from the dark corners of Jana’s imagination…
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I was extremely privileged to include two of Yuko Shimizu’s works in The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal, and if you’re curious as to which pieces, you’ll have to pick up a copy! But I can tell you that I’ve been following Shimizu’s work for years, ever since I started sharing her illustrations on my own Tumblr during that platform’s golden age of art curation. From the first piece I posted, her work felt like discovering a secret garden where Japanese folklore grows wild alongside Western pop culture, where ancient spirits share space with modern anxieties, and where every illustration pulses with a kind of electric mythology.
Shimizu’s visual language makes the ancient feel urgently contemporary. Her linework shifts between delicate and bold, somewhere between neon calligraphy and elegant graffiti – fluid strokes that can transform a simple curve into a dragon’s spine or a woman’s hair into flowing water. Eastern and Western aesthetics collide in her work to create hybrid mythologies where traditional yokai rub shoulders with comic book heroes, cherry blossoms bloom alongside circuit boards, and every composition thrums with symbolic density that rewards closer inspection.
No doubt, this cultural fluency comes from living and working between worlds. Shimizu came from Japan to study at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before settling in New York, where she made the leap from corporate design to freelance illustration. Now she balances creating work for major publications with teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Perhaps it’s this trajectory that allows her to make folklore feel at home in contemporary settings and inner demons take on epic proportions, the kind of visual bilingualism that comes from navigating multiple worlds simultaneously.
The breadth of Shimizu’s client list reads like a fabulous media survey of contemporary publishing, from The New York Times and Time Magazine to DC Comics and children’s book publishers, from Japanese folklore collections to Universal Pictures monster movie posters. Yet despite working across such varied editorial, commercial, and publishing contexts, certain motifs surface again and again in her work: the transformative power of flowing elements, faces that carry both secret intensity and expressive restlessness; creatures caught in moments of metamorphosis where reality and legend converge.
In this limited variant cover art for Dracula, Motherfxxker, a figure free falls through a psychedelic fever dream, a splash of cool color against the swirling hot pinks and oranges that billow around him like cosmic cotton candy. But it’s Dracula’s brides who steal the scene, emerging from the swirling patterns like beautiful mirages, their faces adorned with stars and decorative flourishes – disco goddesses with a taste for blood.
Shimizu nails the comic’s pulpy California psych-horror vibe, where ancient evil meets the decade of excess. The composition pulses with 70s psychedelia – flowing curves and saturated colors seeming to move even when you’re looking straight at them. Floral motifs twist through the design alongside celestial stars; part concert poster, part tarot card, part bad trip.
Commissioned as a magazine cover portrait for New York Walker magazine #14 (targeted toward Japanese audiences in New York City), Shimizu captures Björk’s artistic identity through this portrait where the artist floats in impossible suspension, her face turned upside down while elaborate braids loop and cascade around her. Tiny golden bells nestle among the dark plaits, each tied with delicate blue ribbon bows, suggesting childhood fairy tales where each small tinkling sound summons strange sonic spells. The topsy-turvy positioning seems perfectly natural for someone who’s built a career on upending expectations.
For a New York Times science section article about estrogen’s role in brain health, Shimizu transforms complex endocrinology into something beautiful and organic. A blue brain blooms like an exotic flower, its neural pathways sprouting vibrant petals in purple, pink, and orange while butterflies and bees hover around this impossible garden. The brain grows from rich earth, its stem-like base suggesting that our most complex organ might be more connected to nature’s cycles than we ever imagined. Green leaves unfurl from the brain’s surface while tiny blue spores drift through the black background like microscopic messengers.
The pollinator connection is interesting – hormones carrying messages between different parts of the body, cross-fertilizing systems we once thought were separate. The flowers blooming directly from brain tissue capture the research: estrogen doesn’t visit the brain occasionally; it helps the brain grow and flourish. Here, the brain isn’t a computer humming away in isolation but a living system that blooms and withers with the hormonal seasons of our lives.
For the interior illustrations of Japanese Tales, a collector’s edition published by Folio Society, a parade of yokai streams across a crimson bridge, their procession both menacing and oddly festive. Protruding eyeballs and lolling tongues suggest barely contained chaos; this whole parade might dissolve into mayhem at any moment. Shimizu captures the spirit of Japanese folklore where the supernatural and mundane intersect daily. This bridge becomes a threshold between worlds, and the yokai crossing it are neither purely evil nor benevolent – they’re simply part of the fabric of a universe where the impossible happens every day.
For Catherynne M. Valente’s collection, The Melancholy of Mechagirl, a woman’s profile emerges from a tangle of colorful cables that wind through her long, black hair like digital veins, snaking toward a floating fox mask – kitsune meeting cyborg, downloading folklore directly into her neural networks. A yellow sun burns against the gray textured sky while stylized waves roll beneath, framing this moment where traditional Japanese imagery collides with cyberpunk possibility. Shimizu visualizes the central tension in Valente’s stories: the melancholy of beings caught between worlds, whether machine and human, ancient and futuristic, or dream and reality.
For the cover of Monstrous Affections, an anthology edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, a black-winged creature crouches among towering red thistles, blood dripping from its fanged mouth while a ghostly white arms lies lifeless on the ground beneath its claws. The red thistles bloom impossibly large, their spiky petals matching the creature’s predatory nature. Blood and flowers create an unsettling combination – beauty and violence intertwined like the stories within the collection. Shimizu captures the anthology’s central premise, embodying the paradox these stories explore: creatures that should repel us but somehow fascinate instead.
For a University of Minnesota alumni magazine feature about neutrino research, Shimizu solves the impossible illustration challenge by making the invisible visible, turning abstract physics into cosmic poetr. A serene sun with human features radiates golden beams while countless white dots swirl through the cosmic darkness around it, each speck representing the billions of invisible neutrinos streaming through space and through our bodies every second. These “ghosts of the universe” flow in elegant spirals and streams, their paths traced in white against the infinite black. The neutrinos become star maps, their ghostly presence given form through flowing white currents that connect the sun’s nuclear heart to the underground detectors waiting 500 miles away in northern Minnesota.
For the frontispiece of Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde, published by Beehive Books, Shimizu depicts the flamboyant literary figure emerging from a cascade of peacock feathers, his bow tie perfectly knotted while surrounded by theatrical plumage. The feathers fan out behind him in elaborate eye-spotted displays, both ornate and slightly overwhelming, with detailed linework capturing every curl of hair and feathered barb, creating a visual density that mirrors the richness of his fairy tales – stories where beauty and cruelty coexist in elaborate, sometimes uncomfortable displays.
Created for Matthew Sanborn Smith’s science fiction story “Beauty Belongs to the Flowers” published on TOR.com, Shimizu gives us a vision both lovely and unsettling where a serene face floats in darkness, while countless yellow tubes curve and spiral, connected to a glowing, translucent, bubblinge. An oversized orange flower dominates the foreground, its petals rendered in intricate detail, while smaller petals drift through the composition like escaped fragments of vitality. Here, beauty has become something to be administered rather than naturally occurring, raising questions about what we might lose in our pursuit of perfection.
As a limited edition wraparound variant cover for Batman Returns created in collaboration with Dark Hall Mansion and Warner Brothers, Christmas ornaments tumble through the air around Catwoman like an extremely fantastic snow globe – ruby red, emerald green, sapphire blue spheres, just out of reach of those wickedly curved silver talons. An army of sleek black cat silhouettes surrounds her, all glowing amber eyes and liquid shadows, practically vibrating with that universal feline thought: “Ooh, shiny things!” These aren’t just random cat shapes either – Shimizu crowdsourced reference photos from actual cat owners on social media, so somewhere in this midnight menagerie lurks Mrs. Whiskers from down the street. Here’s Catwoman in all her contradictory glory: part predator, part playmate, Christmas angel with claws that could shred wrapping paper or your face with equal enthusiasm.
As part of Universal Pictures’ “Out of the Shadows” art contest in 2021, where contemporary artists were invited to refresh classic monster movie posters, Shimizu reimagines The Wolf Man through botanical horror. A gnarled hand grows into a tree with blood-red leaves, its bark etched with intricate patterns where flesh becomes wood. The curse spreads like roots through the body, and that medallion face trapped within its star-pointed prison might be all that’s left of the human watching his own transformation, while the hand of glory folklore brings its own dark associations. Shimizu’s poster makes the wolfman’s curse feel organic and inevitable, something that grows from within rather than attacks from without.
Creating cover art for a collectors edition original 1950s Japanese kaiju motion picture Mothra soundtrack released from Waxwork Records, two priestesses in golden robes stand beneath their divine protector, faces grave with ceremonial purpose. Mothra spreads her wings above them, each wing decorated with intricate eye-patterns that seem to watch over her tiny human guardians. The moth’s body gleams with an otherworldly blue, while her wings shimmer in patterns of black, orange, and yellow that suggest both beauty and terrible power.
The twin fairies – Mothra’s earthly voices – stand close together in their matching robes and flower crowns, ready to translate between human and kaiju worlds. An orange sun burns behind them while oversized tropical leaves frame the scene like a shrine painting come to life. Shimizu captures the genuine mythology of Japan’s most benevolent monster, a protective deity who happens to have wings spanning several city blocks.
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categories: art
Over the years, I have created and posted on social media silly mashups of words and images that, as they say, “went viral.” People thought they were a hoot and a holler. The public’s pickle was tickled.
If I turned some of the public domain ones into postcards and sold variety packs of, say, three each, would that be something you would purchase from me? And how much would you be willing to pay for it? $12? $15?
In the meantime, I know how the internet is, so please don’t steal my very fun and exciting idea! If I see my little postcards here for sale at some wish.com level Redbubble equivalent, I will be very upset!
categories: art
I’m not looking at or enganging with social media right now and mostly it is fine (actually it’s fucking great amazing I love it) but right at this very second it is KILLING ME because the first thing I want to do when I see something like this antique French cat brooch is share it far and wide.
Now you have to look at it instead! Look at it! LOOK AT THIS THING.
categories: art
If you were a child of a certain age in the 80s, you were undoubtedly aware of the rockstar sensation that is Jem, whether you were enthralled by the Saturday morning television show or enraptured by the shiny, poseable dolls. You probably never consciously had this thought while mesmerized by the boxes at Toys-R-Us, but it must have registered somewhere in your little brain that the box artwork possessed a crazy level of craftsmanship and attention. The illustrations felt too good, too real, too carefully observed for their humble cardboard home. Did it ever occur to me to wonder about the artist behind these marvels, the actual human person who created them? I can’t say it did, until I heard someone mention Sharon Knettell‘s name in a Hasbro package art documentary that Yvan was watching on YouTube the other night.
Knettell, it turns out, was a fine artist who brought a borderline obsessive level of dedication to what could have been throwaway commercial illustration. While other companies were slapping generic pretty faces on their doll boxes, Hasbro had somehow convinced Knettell to create what can only be described as tiny masterpieces of commercial portraiture.
Knettell grew up in Connecticut, daughter of a Mad Men-era advertising executive, marinating in the sophisticated high-end commercial illustration that most people only glimpsed in glossy magazines. Her father showed her work by the great illustrators of the era, and she was captivated by their technical perfection. But what she brought to Jem left even that rarefied aesthetic education in the dust.
She didn’t work from photos or sketches, no way, that would have been too simple! She hired live models, had custom wigs made in the exact colors and styles of the dolls’ hair, commissioned replica costumes down to the last sequin, and then painted from life using airbrush over colored pencil. FOR DOLL BOXES. The woman was essentially staging full Broadway productions just to paint toy advertisements.
The world she was illustrating demanded this approach. Jem lived in a universe of pure visual excess where every outfit was a statement piece, every hairstyle defied physics, and every performance blazed with soap opera glam rock energy—part Joan Collins, part Lita Ford, all spectacular nonsense. The story followed Jerrica Benton, a young woman who inherited her father’s music company and used a holographic computer called Synergy to transform into Aquolina Pink Sugar-haired Jem, the lead singer of an all-girl rock band called the Holograms. The show ran from 1985 to 1988 as Jem and her bandmates battled their rival group, the Misfits, for musical supremacy while navigating romance, friendship, and the occasional kidnapping plot.
Every character was a living mood board, head to toe. Jem’s wardrobe included holographic bodysuits and gowns that seemed to be made of liquid metal, while the Misfits favored aggressive styling with electric colors, wild animal prints, fishnet mesh, and cascading fringe. This was the world that Knettell had to translate onto doll boxes—entire universes of fluorescent glam-rock fantasy compressed into a few precious square inches of cardboard real estate.
What she delivered feels almost impossible when you think about it. While most doll boxes featured flat, lifeless illustrations that could have been anyone in anything, her work practically vibrated with energy. She painted Jem’s metallic pink dress with actual reflective depth, each fold catching imaginary stage lights. Pizzazz’s lime green hair had sculptural volume and movement, every strand placed with surgical precision. The sequined details on their outfits weren’t shortcuts or suggestions; they were individually rendered points of light, each one a tiny star in her meticulous constellation.
Because Knettell worked from live models wearing actual replicas of the dolls’ outfits, complete with custom-made wigs in those impossible neon shades, every pose had the authentic electricity of a real performance. Her models were inhabiting these characters, leaning into microphones with breathless intensity, gripping instruments like talismans, caught mid-gesture in ways that suggested actual music was happening just outside the frame.
Those box illustrations remain seared into collective memory decades later with incredible clarity. Long after the show ended and the dolls disappeared from toy store shelves, Knettell’s artwork endures not just as nostalgic artifact, but as a visual language that defined an entire generation’s understanding of what glamour, glitter, fashion, and fame could look like. Her illustrations went beyond selling articulated fashion dolls to become cultural touchstones; they still influence how we think about fabulous 80s fashion, style, and aesthetics decades later. The sentimental pull and reverence is so strong that mint-condition Jem dolls in their original packaging now sell for thousands of dollars, with collectors specifically hunting down boxes featuring her work like they’re chasing down lost Rembrandts or something.
In an era before social media, before Instagram filters and digital glamour became ubiquitous, she was already painting with the hyperreal aesthetic that would define how we present ourselves online decades later. Those perfectly lit faces, those impossibly vivid colors, that sense of performative perfection, it’s all there in her doll box art, a crystal ball showing our future obsession with curated visual identity.
Knettell continues to paint, though her focus has shifted from commercial illustration to fine art portraiture. Working primarily from life rather than photographs, she creates sumptuous oil paintings that showcase the same technical wizardry she brought to those Jem illustrations, but with a quieter, more contemplative approach. Her recent work follows a similar style to 19th-century Impressionist Edgar Degas, but Knettell has a different angle: where Degas painted the often exploited young dancers of the Paris Opera, girls caught in a web of poverty and predation, Knettell focuses on contemporary female dancers wearing theatrical, fantastical costumes, gorgeous celebrations rather than somber documentations of their world.
Her current paintings feature life-sized figures in elaborate theatrical dress—a woman with bright teal hair adorned with purple flowers, wearing a sequined dress against a floral backdrop; a dancer in a vibrant red wig and heart-patterned tulle skirt, holding a single red rose like she’s accepting an invisible standing ovation; a ballerina in a fluffy pink tutu posed gracefully on a blue stool, every fold of fabric rendered with the same obsessive care she once lavished on Jem’s holographic gowns.
The same eye that could make Jem’s burnished minidress seem real enough to touch now captures the luminous whisper of light across a portrait subject’s face, bringing the same lyrical expressiveness and energy to fine art. Whether she’s painting rock stars for toy boxes or dancers for museum walls, Knettell understands something essential: art is about elevating the already extraordinary to the truly, truly, truly outrageous. That eight-year-old standing mesmerized in the Toys-R-Us aisle knew they were witnessing something magical, even if they couldn’t put it into words. Art is magic. And that kind of magic doesn’t just sell dolls—it makes kids believe in impossible things, elevates toy packaging to gallery-worthy work, shapes how entire generations think about glamour, and changes how you see the world.
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Have you ever had that feeling that someone is watching you from just beyond the tree line? That prickling sensation on the back of your neck while wandering a misty forest path? Perhaps it was Ed Binkley, sketchbook in hand, documenting your encounter with his meticulously detailed woodland denizens before you even realized they were there.
Binkley’s art feels less created and more… discovered, as if he’s somehow gained access to a hidden archive of supernatural field notes. His faeries, shamans, and assorted cryptid curiosities peer from the pages with such specificity that one suspects he must keep have recruited them as sources and informants, feeding him scraps of imagination and starlight so that he may best capture their likenesses in exquisite detail. There’s a sense of authenticity to these beings—they seem to exist with complete lives beyond the boundaries of the page, carrying personalities, histories, and perhaps even opinions about which mushrooms make the best rooftops.
“Corvid Priestess” peers from the pages of my book, The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal with a gaze that suggests ancient knowledge and ritual importance. Her avian elements aren’t fancy accessories selected on a whim—they’re integral to her identity as a being who bridges worlds. The remarkable fusion of human and bird creates something wholly original, a priestess whose connection to corvid energy manifests through both spirit and form. One imagines her presiding over moonlit ceremonies, communicating in languages both human and avian, serving as translator between realms.
Binkley’s worlds exist next door to our own, like that neighbor’s house you’re pretty sure hosts something freaky every full moon but can never quite catch in the act. In “Soul Whisperer,” a veiled figure guides spirits to their next existence with all the calm efficiency of a supernatural TSA agent. Their veil—adorned with beads and tiny bones—makes music “like tiny wind chimes, inaudible to the rest of us,” which is just as well because the last thing you want when crossing to the afterlife is a jangly soundtrack announcing your arrival.
The textures in Binkley’s work invite closer inspection and are so tactile you’ll find yourself absently trying to pet your computer screen. Every feather, strand of moss-like beard, and antler-etched rune is rendered with precision that transforms flat images into seemingly tangible beings. His technique marries digital sketching with traditional colored pencil in a harmonious artistic union that preserves the warmth of handcrafted art while embracing technological possibilities. The result feels both ancient and immediate—beings documented in their natural habitat rather than merely imagined.
“Scout” embodies youthful vigilance and has all the hallmarks of that kid in the neighborhood who somehow always knows everybody’s business before they do. This watchful entity seems caught mid-reconnaissance, probably reporting back to some elder woodland power about the shitty humans who keep leaving energy bar wrappers in the sacred grove. The slight head tilt practically broadcasts, “I saw what you did last summer solstice.”
Binkley’s figures inhabit a rich tapestry of folklore and fantasy literature, from high-fantasy to horror to dreamscapes. These beings explore varied emotional territories while maintaining the distinctive thread that connects all his creations—a sense that these beings belong to coherent, complex societies with their own rules, rituals, and relationships.
In “Mantis,” we meet another hybrid being, one who has embraced the full mantis lifestyle. Its elongated limbs and complex garments suggest a society with fashion magazines, designer labels, and possibly a “What Not to Wear (When Decapitating And Eating Your Mate”) reality show. The figure has perfected that quintessential mantis vibe, that stillness unique to mantids—an unnerving quality of absolute presence that makes you wonder if you’re being sized up as prey or simply observed with alien curiosity.
“Chrysalis” showcases our fascination with transformation, and who among us hasn’t experienced an awkward transitional phase where we’re neither fully one thing nor another? (Minus the literal exoskeleton and carapace detritus, presumably.)
The figure exists in that universal state of becoming that feels simultaneously exciting and mortifying, the human equivalent of butterfly soup, that vulnerable yet wildly potential state where you’ve committed to shedding your old self but haven’t quite figured out what your wings look like. Like three chapters into writing a book with no clear ending in sight, and you haven’t fully worked out exactly what it is you’re writing about yet or how any of it relates to anything else at all, and actually, I don’t even know if that example relates to this artwork in the slightest, but that’s where I am at mentally right now!
“Listener” depicts a being tuned to incomprehensible eldritch frequencies. The meditative pose suggests active reception of cosmic broadcasts—picking up everything from tree gossip to star conversations to the subtextual grumblings of tectonic plates. Would such sensitivity be a gift or a curse? Would the constant chatter of atoms and echoes of ancient sounds drive one to madness? Or would it connect one to the universe in deliriously strange and wonderful ways?
I’ve developed a particular affection for Binkley’s goblins—those delightful domestic prankers who, I’m convinced, live in my own home. What else explains the earring that vanished from my bathroom counter, only to materialize six months later inside the House of Psychotic Women tote bag I hadn’t used since last winter? Or the specific creak my hallway floorboard makes at 3:17 AM with metronomic consistency?
Just last week, I set my coffee mug down while checking email, only to find it had migrated to the top of my bookshelf when I turned back around. The mug, notably, had a Terry Pratchett quote about magic on it—clearly my resident goblin has a flair for the ironic. Binkley’s illustrations give these mischief-makers faces and forms, validating my suspicions that I share my living space with creatures whose entertainment comes at the expense of my sanity and organizational systems.
That’s okay, goblins; I love your crazy ways!
In our world of increasingly mass-produced, algorithm-approved visual pablum, Ed Binkley’s intricately artful fantasies feel like stumbling upon a secret garden where the plants talk back and have opinions, the bugs have human faces and agendas, and there are secret societies teeming beneath your feet, just below the range of hearing, and beyond the range of sight… but surrounding us constantly.
His creatures and beings communicate the stance of those who have traveled far, possibly through dangerous terrain, to seek admission to mysteries beyond our perception. The gravitas in their bearing suggests responsibilities beyond mortal comprehension—perhaps they maintain boundaries between dimensions or ensure that certain ancient entities remain slumbering. And yet their fusion of hybrid features with expressive humanity suggests perceptions which, though must differ wildly from our own, lurks a consciousness with recognizable emotions and thoughts that experience the universal mixture of awe and terror, hope and uncertainty, the willingness to be transformed by what comes next, that comes from merely being alive, from existing.
Each Binkley piece carries that uncanny feeling of recognition – not because you’ve met these specific beings before but because some ancient part of your brain has always known they’re out there, watching, waiting, and occasionally borrowing your good stork-handled stitch-snipping scissors without asking. His art whispers: the world is weirder, wilder, and more wonderful than they (you know, THEY) would ever have you believe.
Who are you going to believe? Them? Or Ed Binkley? I believe you, Ed.
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?