Anyone who has ever worked on any number of projects knows that while it’s tough to pick favorites amongst them, or favorite pieces and parts from within them…well, you’re always going to have a best-loved darling or precious or two.
Jaime Johnson Aelavanthara
Some of my favorite types of art to research and gaze upon in The Art of Darkness might not be what you’d expect to hear from me (or maybe it is if you’ve listened to my ramblings long enough!) Though I love me some ghosts and ghouls and myths and monsters…do you know what I absolutely love to lose myself in? Mysterious vistas creeping with strange flora, ancient lands, and eerie ruins. Marveling at the fragile, verdant curve of a fern, the unexpected colors and textures revealed in the heart of a crimson rosebud, a glistening drop of morning dew atop a plump, inky nightshade berry. Lonely landscapes and tenebrous topographies shadowed in wild darkness and raw beauty, where a boundless sense of nature overwhelms with breathless, bewitching intensity.
And why, even though these scenes feel fraught, fearsome, fatal – why do they still, despite everything, call to you? Why do we at times find ourselves desperate to crawl deep within these somber scenes, to disappear forever?
Nightjar Illustration / Adam Burke
Do you feel it calling, too? I’ll meet you there, in the darkness.
…where you’ll also find all of the artists I have included in this post today.
Marco MazzoniYaroslav Gerzhedovich Agostino Arrivabene
This was originally written for Haute Macabre in 2018; considering that Alex’s work is on the cover of my forthcoming book, I thought it was definitely time to revive and reshare this post…!
Initially, I was torn, truly torn, when examining the painstaking collage work of Alex Eckman-Lawn. Deep, dense, full of doom and gloom and dark details, these surreal, lonely portraits, on one hand, called forth a sickening dread in the pit of my stomach and give my heart a little lurch. But on the other, and at the same time… they caused an involuntary, choking giggle. As if a shadowy horror had crawled its way from the void to the sanctity of my home, and after an agonizing wait whilst I cowered at the peephole, it gave a smart rap on the door and told me a knock-knock joke.
Perhaps it’s an odd take on things, but I once envisioned the above scenario, I saw these pieces through fresh eyes– and instead of a face-full of nightmarish chaos, they appeared wondrously playful, like a funny postcard from the midnight recesses of your soul, just when you need it most. Have a laugh, they seem to say, or here, have a kitten! Oh, hey, it’s just your dear old skull peeking out to say hello, that’s all, no worries! Little voids, the faces-within-your face, checking in on you from the inside, popping out to say, “hi!” and, “how’s it going?” and, “have you heard the one about…?”
A Philadelphia-born illustrator who “spends his days in the gutter and his nights in the sewer”, Alex creates multi-layered, hand-cut, paper collages using everything from his original digital paintings to imagery from old medical texts. His work has appeared in comic books, on album covers, book covers, T-shirts, music videos, and posters.
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Foxes stalking the darkness, padding through a thicket of thorns. Shadowy snakes snarled in somnolent repose. A skull cupped tenderly, a candle’s flame snuffed. Rendered in ash, chalk-lead, and ink on black cotton rag, the funereal monochrome visions of artist and printmaker Dylan Garrett Smith reflect the artist’s views regarding our relationships with the natural world. Combining ecological and occult concepts with existential fears and anarchism, Smith stresses the importance of the cycle of birth, bloom, and decay and the ultimate triumph of nature in the end–whatever that ‘end’ might be.
More peeks and pages from The forthcoming The Art of Darkness (September 6th is coming quickly, preorder now!)
This is a piece titled Vögguvísa by Becky Munich, a long-time like-minded weirdo, kindred spirit, and occasional partner-in-crime. You may recall that Becky and I worked together on the beloved fan-favorite Occult Activity Books, volumes one and two!
“… On the surface these sinister, ethereal wraiths and monstrous femme fatales simultaneously menace and beguile, but in a strange and playful twist, there’s sly and creepy clever mischief to be found in the details, and it’s clear to see that this artist takes her spooky business quite seriously while winking at us playfully at the same time.”
I’ve been OBSESSED with Becky’s works ever since I first laid eyes on them and I am so pleased to have been able to include her work in The Art of Darkness. And as you can see in the second photo, the original Vögguvísa hangs on my wall, cautioning me every day to shush my pie-hole. Or choose my words wisely. Who knows! She is a very mysterious lady, after all.
I have long been familiar with the haunting romanticism of Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photography, often losing myself in their eerie atmospheres and spectral moods – elegant ghost stories and hazy hallucinations of antique decadence, beloved and perfect, all.
However, I had never seen until tonight her 1981 series Unseen Versailles. In the late 1970s, while living in Paris, Turbeville discovered the Château de Versailles. Initially refused access for a fashion shoot, she was granted permission to photograph the estate during its renovation, thanks to her admirer and friend, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Turbeville spent a whole winter there, presenting her work in the book Unseen Versailles in 1981.
This project came at a pivotal moment in the château’s history. In 1979, the same year Versailles was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the palace closed for extensive renovations. This timing allowed Turbeville unprecedented access to a dormant Versailles, far removed from its status as one of France’s most popular tourist attractions.
Rather than showcase the polished grandeur typically associated with Versailles, Turbeville sought out its hidden facets: neglected storage rooms, ghostly private chambers shrouded in dust cloths, and halls filled with broken statuary. She scattered autumn leaves on floors to emphasize abandonment and neglect. The result is a haunting vision of this excessive place, a ghostly evocation of memory and melancholic magic in long-waiting derelict, dust-shrouded twilight chambers.
Turbeville’s lens captured not just empty rooms, but a landscape of forgotten objects – hairpins, papers, shoes, masks – all given equal narrative weight. As she wrote in her book’s preface, these items became “fleeting witnesses” to the palace’s past, so delicate that “an open window might blow them all away.” This approach aligned with Jackie Kennedy’s vision: to evoke the feeling that Versailles was inhabited by “ghosts and memories,” offering viewers a uniquely intimate and melancholic perspective on this historic space.
These images, at once evocative and unsettling, embody Turbeville’s distinct, intensely personal vision. Her photographs create a charged atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity, projecting a sense of isolation and romanticism frozen in time. By combining elements of architecture and décor, Turbeville constructs a dream world where the gilded beauty of 18th-century rooms coexists with decay and dereliction. This cinematic approach transforms Versailles into a backdrop for untold stories, inviting viewers to lose themselves in a hauntingly beautiful, timeless realm between reality and imagination.
In “Unseen Versailles,” Turbeville’s photographs show the gilded beauty of the 18th-century rooms while evoking the complex history of this magnificent palace, built by Louis XIV to consolidate the aristocracy under his roof. Her sophisticated and intellectual work often featured gardens and architecture as backdrops to cinematic evocations of untold stories, set in dream worlds of castles and gardens, often decayed and derelict, timeless and unreal.
Turbeville’s work in “Unseen Versailles” continues to captivate, offering a timeless exploration of beauty, decay, and the lingering echoes of history. Her ability to transform the familiar into something hauntingly unfamiliar invites us to see Versailles – and perhaps all spaces rich with history – through a new, more contemplative lens. In doing so, she reveals the poetic power of abandonment and the enduring allure of faded grandeur.
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?
There exists bizarre, dramatic Tom Adams Agatha Christie book cover art for your every mood. Tag yourself! I’m a disembodied foot crawling with flies and dripping with jewels.
1968 Reader’s Digest edition of “Rebecca” by Daphne De Maurier.
It must have been fate. Born eleven days apart on opposite coasts, Leo and Diane met, competed artistically, and eventually fell in love while attending Parsons School of Design, each aspiring to a life of art. After their marriage in 1957, the artists initially pursued separate careers in illustration before recognizing their strengths were collaborative in nature. In an effort to work in a particular style that they both could master, they symbiotically and seamlessly melded their personalities and styles, employing pastels, colored pencil, watercolor, acrylic, stencils, typography, woodcut, pochoir, found-object assemblage, collage, and sculpture into an entity/partnership that they came to refer to as “the artist.”
Noted Leo on the gorgeously striking complexity of their distinctive decorative realism and unconventional techniques: “People often comment on the ‘Dillon style.’ I think that someplace, the two of us made a pact with each other. We both decided that we would give up the essence of ourselves, that part that made the art each of us did our own. And I think that in doing that we opened the door to everything.”
Marie Laveau Cover Artwork, 1977
The Dillons became famous in the science fiction community for their imaginative and incredible variety of drawings and illustrations for prints, book jackets, textbooks, album covers; the books of authors such as Ray Bradbury, Garth Nix, and Isaac Asimov were all embellished with cover art revealing “the artist’s” unique vision. The Dillons were presented with the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist in 1971, making Diane the first woman to receive the award. Outside the world of fantasy and science fiction, the Dillons became renowned for their numerous children’s picture books celebrated for illustrating stories featuring all ethnicities and cultural heritages–for which they received unprecedented back-to-back Caldecott Medals.
Cover art for the Voyages: The 25th World Fantasy Convention booklet (as seen here)
original art for the cover of John Brunner’s The Traveler in Black
DEATHBIRD STORIES, by Harlan Ellison cover art
Queen Zixi of Ix , or the Story of the Magic Cloak LP art
A Wrinkle in Time cover study
The Ring, by Piers Anthony 1968
Cover art for World’s End by Joan D. Vinge
The Tempest album cover Caedmon Records (1975)
Different: An Anthology of Homosexual Short Stories cover art
