I don't often use these newsletters to do self-promotion (because when I do, I get a slew of unsubscribes, and it hurts my feelings!), but I thought it might be cool to give you guys a sneak peek of some of the contemporary art you can expect to see in The Art of the Unknown, which will be on the shelves in a month's time!
You may see some artists you recognize here today, which is of course always a very cool feeling, and who knows, you may even encounter some new-to-you artists and creators as well. Here's hoping! Also! If you preordered a copy of the book and would like a bookmark and a signed book plate, be sure to fill out this form here to get your goodies!
✥ The featured image is from the "Hidden Watchers" chapter. In The Ancestors, by Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos, four hooded figures stand in ceremonial formation behind an immense disembodied eye, their faces frozen in expressions of ancient vigilance while the cosmic pupil hovers before them like a portal between worlds. Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos, whose work explores the mythical, mystical, and occult, employs stark black-and-white linework to conjure these ancestral watchers as primordial guardians of forbidden knowledge, their presence simultaneously protective and ominous. The floating eye serves as both collective vision and warning, suggesting that the dead never truly depart but instead transform into observers who bear witness across the veil, maintaining their eternal regard from beyond. Deeply influenced by occult traditions, Vasconcelos creates in this image a striking testament to the ancestral gaze – the sensation that those who came before us continue to track our movements through time.
✥ In Becky Munich's haunting illustration, "Death Smoke". giving up the ghost becomes an actual physical process, with ectoplasmic tendrils pouring from parted lips to coil upward into spectral form. The contemporary artist renders this supernatural emanation with delicate lines and a subdued palette of soft greys, blues, and whispers of pink against a dreamlike atmosphere. The subject's head tilts backward in serene release, her pale face captured in profile, hair cascading in midnight waves, her eyes blank, unseeing. Munich's work merges beauty with horror, creating figures who command their darkness rather than fall victim to it, who relish their ghostly encounters and otherworldly dealings. The expression suggests not fear but willing partnership with the supernatural forces passing through mortal flesh. What emerges appears to be ancestral knowledge or buried secrets finally taking vaporous form, claiming its own separate existence as it unfurls into the ether.
✥ Four electric turquoise skeletons strike balletic poses behind ornate arched windows, their bones glowing like radioactive stage lights in Anna Mond's gleefully macabre take on Swan Lake. The artist operates in what they call "Fantasticalizm"—a visual prism that transforms everything into something gloriously unhinged. Reality tilts and warps through Mond's filter, everyday scenes becoming stages for skeletal performers and goggle-eyed creatures who cavort in garish, gooey blobs of color. This corps de ballet performs against swirling blues and rich reds, arms curved gracefully overhead, legs bent mid-arabesque, utterly undeterred by their complete lack of flesh. The mosaic floor beneath them pulses with dark blues and greens while ornate golden vines frame the arched windows. Mond paints spirits who chose eternal dance rehearsal over peaceful rest, souls for whom mortality was just an inconvenient costume change, death merely an opportunity to perfect their grand jetés for all eternity.
Four more for you, but that's it, because I don't want to give it all away!
✥ In a chapter about the Uncanny Familiar, we have Matthew Bober (the nephew of Richard Bober, of Wrinkle in Time cover art infamy!) who casts his theatrical troupe with strange performers: a bright-haired head shrouded in plastic stares with red glass eyes, flanked by a crescent horn that curves like it fell off a mythological beast and a figure with what appears to be a wind-up toy mechanism topping a stitched leather body with teensy porcelain doll hands, one clutching a single jaunty feather. Below, an animal skull presides while a painted black-and-white cat watches with the passive attention of someone who's seen this ceremony a hundred times. The nephew of fantasy illustrator Richard Bober spent countless nights watching his uncle paint, learning how to see objects as characters with their own stories. Now he gathers misfit ceramic creatures with slight chips and haunting expressions, vacant-eyed dolls asking to be noticed, his hyperrealistic technique capturing every worn edge with loving attention. Here he's assembled a cast mid-performance, frozen in the moment before something terrible or wonderful happens. It's a play that hasn't been written yet, or maybe one that's been running in empty theaters for ages, waiting for the right audience to stumble in.
✥ In the same chapter, in Jane Dashley's “Masked Twins”, two sisters are caught in a bizarre ritual of face-swapping! In this uncanny domestic tableau, childhood games take a decidedly unsettling turn. One girl, dressed in ethereal blue, peers through a pristine white harlequin mask while clutching a small cat; her twin in white has transformed herself with a slick black leather hood that renders her features anonymous and strange. Between them stands a miniature soldier with a beast's face—neither toy nor guardian but something that belongs to whatever twilight zone it is where nightmares go to play house. Dashley's fever-bright imagination transforms this ordinary scene into a staging ground for freaky identity theft, suggesting these sisters have graduated from ordinary make-believe to becoming their own imaginary friends, swapping identities with their shadow selves, exchanging places with their own reflections. The real question is whether they remember how to change back.
✥ Meanwhile, in Transformative Powers, there is Tino Rodriguez Calaquichix Faerie, a pastel, spun-sugar skeleton soaring over a rainbow highway astride a spotted butterfly, dandelion wand raised in jubilant greeting! This playful dance with mortality explodes with the color and joy that defines Tino Rodriguez's enchanted visual universes, where death wears flowers and flies on butterfly wings. Rodriguez infuses his work with the captivating allure of Catholic saints, European fairytales, and vibrant Mexican myths, creating visual poetry that transcends borders and language. This skeletal faerie, neither fearsome nor grim, invites us into a world where transformation is celebrated with gentle humor and a luminous palette. Here we see how the macabre becomes magical and how profound metamorphosis, even death, can be a vibrant adventure. In this joyful vision of transformation, Rodriguez reveals that everything changes, nothing truly ends, and even our bones can sprout wings to carry us into brilliant new dimensions of being.
✥ And finally, in Sacred Cycles, a disembodied visage crowned in a profusion of blooms in Hannah Flowers' “Flora”: scarlet poppies, ivory roses, delicate blues and vivid yellows clustered and cascading against dim shadows. A snail inches up the jaw while a butterfly pauses at the temple, admiring the view. Hannah Flowers (b. 1989) paints almost perversely beautiful surfaces for such a seemingly macabre tableau, and this severed head floating serene among its opulent floral abundance feels less like tragedy and more like rapturous transformation. The Tasmanian-born, Scotland-based artist works genuine vermilion and lapis lazuli onto Belgian linen, rendering each dewy petal with such luscious attention that the paint feels edible, wearable, kissable. The flora glows jeweled against the void with intoxicating intensity, every surface drips with swooning beauty, the heavy, heady gravitas of death and decay but make it rich, ripe and deliriously decadent.
Thanks for visiting me here, my extraordinary poppies and rapturous butterflies! Until next time…!
-S.
7707 Merrill Rd Jacksonville, FL 32277, United States
