2026
53 days until The Art of the Unknown is loose in the world!
When I was writing this book, I read everything I could get my hands on. Thinking about how artists engage with mystery, with the uncanny, with liminal space, with things that resist explanation, means understanding mystery from about fifty different angles at once. A color theorist sees it one way. A mystic sees it another. Someone writing about the history of an artist’s practice sees it differently still. You can’t really explore the unknowable by staying inside a single framework. You have to move between them, hold multiple versions in your head at the same time, slot one way of seeing beside another and see if they line up, or overlap but don’t quite fit, or point you somewhere you weren’t expecting.
So I read about wonder and how to think about it. About ideas that haven’t surfaced yet, the ones you have to go diving deep, sometimes holding your breath, in the dark. About words that almost exist, all the emotions we feel but can’t name. About how to look at something and actually see it, not just recognize it. About color as a language, how certain blues and golds change what your brain does. About the weird and the eerie as their own separate territories, not just variations on creepy.
I read about women painting things nobody else could paint, who saw invisible worlds and made them visible anyway. Those who understood that the body was a place where ceremony happened, where suffering happened, where magic was real. I read about stones and what they’ve witnessed, what they remember. About journeys through actual landscape and journeys through the landscape of your own mind, and how sometimes they’re the same thing. About spaces that don’t quite belong anywhere, the in-between places. About how artists have always been trying to show us what we can’t see: the hollow earth, the spirit world, the thing beneath the thing beneath the thing.
I read neuroscience alongside mysticism. I read about the brain’s capacity for wonder next to essays on being human in an age that doesn’t seem to value wonder. I read about artists who fished in their dreams for images. I read color theory. I read sci-fi art from the 1970s. I read about artists working in impossible spaces, making impossible things.
Some of the reading confirmed what I was already seeing—the same questions showing up in different mouths, different eras. Some of it sat uncomfortably next to the other stuff, didn’t fit, and made me hold both ideas at once without picking a winner. Some of it hassled and wrassled with my preconceived notions and things I thought I understood.
A bibliography is useful if you want to know what someone cited. It’s a paper trail, a record of the official sources. But I think … it’s not the same as the actual reading that shapes a book. I want to know what other writers were living inside when they created their work. Not just the stuff they quoted directly, I want the things that haunted them, that rerouted their thinking, that squatted in their head taking up space and changing the shape of how they see. I assume there are people like me who want that too. People who are curious about the texture of someone else’s musings, the threads of their obsessions, the fabric of their focus, the full tapestry of their inquiry. So that’s how I handle this list at the back of the book.
The further reading list at the back of The Art of the Unknown isn’t organized by relevance or by how directly each book appears in the text. It’s not a ranked list of “essential” sources. It’s arranged alphabetically because that seems logical and fair. The books that shaped this work, all weighted equally, with no hierarchy. Some I read cover to cover. Others I dipped into for a single image or idea. Some I quoted, some I referenced vaguely, some merely colored the way I thought about this, that, or the other thing. Some I just absorbed in a way that only I might ever know, and I lived in them for a moment while I was pondering a particular detail, and maybe it made no difference to the caption about a painting or sculpture I wrote, or maybe it did, but it felt right to include.
The books on this list don’t all point toward the same thing. They don’t all agree. Some of them would probably argue with each other if they could! But that’s exactly what you need when you’re thinking about the unknowable. One answer is never enough!
What book have you read that changed how you see without ever being directly “about” the thing you were working on? What have you read that became essential even though it seemed tangential? Tell me about a book that’s still shifting and reshaping the way you think about things and exist in this world? I want to hear all about the mysteries lining your shelves!
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