2026
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.
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