2026
Here’s an entirely unrelated thing! A smattering of artful tidbits from the chapters of my forthcoming book, The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny and Unexplained, due into this world on September 1 and available for preorder now.
What Wenzel Hablik (1881–1934)achieves in this magnificent artwork makes the word ‘attempt’ in his titles seem almost comically modest. In Starry Sky, Attempt(1909), this visionary Czech artist transforms the cosmos into a pulsing, living thing. Planets hang at eye level, stars cluster and swarm like bees, and the very fabric of space seems encrusted with crystalline light. This crystalline quality was no accident – a chance discovery of a crystal fragment in his childhood sparked Hablik’s lifelong obsession with geometric forms and luminous patterns. Against a backdrop of deepest midnight, his celestial bodies pulse and throb with impossible colors. Crimson planets hang like ripe fruit, violet nebulae swirl like smoke, and countless stars burn in constellations of gold, azure, and white. That Hablik called this a mere‘attempt’ speaks volumes – as if this breathtaking cosmic vision were just a preliminary sketch rather than the universe reimagined in its full glory.
Leaf-like spirits spiral through the air while a lone figure sits among wildflowers, witnessing the hidden face of the breeze. Robert James Enraght Moony (1879–1946), influenced by Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites, believed the natural world harbored invisible forces that revealed themselves only to patient observers. Magic doesn’t require remote wilderness; sometimes it’s waiting for someone willing to sit still and really look. His 1938 oil painting is essentially about how the world is constantly doing amazing things right in front of us, but we’re all too busy scrolling on our phones to notice. (Well, they didn’t have phones in 1938, but you get the idea.) We’ve all experienced this: you’re sitting in some random place when, suddenly, the air feels electric, like the world just reminded you that it’s a miracle, that you’re a miracle, that this ordinary day in 1938, or right now, is actually the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened.
In the gloaming of a haunted forest, Dante Gabriel Rossetti(1828–82) stages an encounter with existential terror: meeting your exact double while on a romantic stroll. (‘So… come here often?’ suddenly becomes a deeply unsettling question.) Twomedieval lovers stumble upon their exact replicas, creating a mirrored quartet of supernatural dread. The woman on the right swoons dramatically, while her companion draws his sword against this impossible apparition. The doubled figures aren’t reflections but solid presences, glowing with eerie phosphorescence against the darkening woods. Rossetti calledthis his ‘Bogie drawing’ and paintedseveral versions over the years. Rossetti reportedly used himself and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, as models for the imperiled couple, painting one version during their honeymoon, of all times. Folk beliefs hold thatencountering one’s doppelgängerportends imminent death, lendingthis woodland date a macabre edge. What terror might we feel, meeting ourselves in the flesh, our secret selves made manifest?
A woman floats in dark waters, her reflection staring back with eerie ambivalence, both versions seemingly unbothered by their impossible arrangement. Leonor Fini(1908–96) paints a doubled existence where neither face claims to be the original – they simply coexist, calm as you please, while three skulls drift past and dried leaves cling to a barren branch. The Argentine-born artist gives us feminine power at the end of the world (or perhaps its beginning – the title suggests both), yet her subject appears utterly untroubled by the apocalyptic scenery. The cracked, aged texture makes the woman feel ancient, eternal, as if she’s been taking this same leisurely soak since the lake first formed. In the distance, buildings shudder under a moody sky touched with orange and green – civilization reduced to a faint silhouette on the horizon. But why worry? The water’s fine, the company’s quiet, and there’s something marvelously peaceful about having your own reflection as your only companion at the end of everything.
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