Unquiet
Things

I have been traveling and am behind on everything, and so I don’t have much lined up for the ol’ blog this week. SO I thought I’d pull a lazy move and share an update to a blog post I wrote a few years ago, Bargain Bin Romance, where I captioned some gothic romance covers with silly, made-up nonsense. It occurred to me that these would work better with some cheesy graphics, and I even added a few more to the mix!

Anyway, back to normal (?) updates once I get my shit together!

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?

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Ývan surprised me with the biggest of all surprises for my birthday! This morning we drove to an Old Navy parking lot to pick up our newest art acquisition: this fancy orc guy, an original painting by none other than the late Richard Bober (he of mystery artist Wrinkle in Time infamy!)

I loved this magnificent gentleman the first time I laid eyes on him a few years ago and my gast was completely flabbered when I realized Ývan had stored that tidbit away and later secured him for me. Get you a partner and collaborator who delights in your delights, for real!

Ývan was later aghast to learn I have renamed this fine fellow Dominic Toretto.

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I recently wrote about building my own personal curriculum to better understand 1) the ideas and concepts around the term “hauntology,” and 2) wrap my head around Julia Kristeva’s writings. But it occurred to me that I’d be terribly remiss if I didn’t mention my own books in terms of creating some courses for self-learning!

I put together a (hopefully very shareable) slideshow of graphics about how each book might assist in studies of the arcane & esoteric, the darker side of life, and the fantastical, and how you shouldn’t skip the visual component when you’re deepening your understanding of this, that, or the other thing. (Coming from a rather lazy student, I mean obviously more pictures and less words is the way to go hehehe.)

Building Your Personal Curriculum: Where My Books Fit

If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen people talking about “personal curriculums,” essentially, self-directed courses of study built around whatever you’re genuinely curious about. Instead of following someone else’s syllabus, you’re creating your own path through a subject, pulling together books, films, essays, art, music, whatever feeds your particular obsession.

It’s a beautiful way to learn, and it’s having a moment because people are hungry for depth, for expertise that comes from genuine interest rather than algorithmic recommendation. You get to be both student and curator of your own education.

I love this concept because it’s exactly how I’ve always learned: following threads of interest across mediums and disciplines, building connections between visual art and literature and history and folklore. It’s also, not coincidentally, how I approach curating my books. (It’s also a good reason to buy new notebooks!)

Which brings me to this: if you’re building a personal curriculum, here’s where my Art in the Margins series fits.

Studying the occult, symbolism, or esoteric art history?

The Art of the Occult belongs in your visual studies. From theosophy and kabbalah to the zodiac and alchemy, from spiritualism and ceremonial magic to the elements and sacred geometry—this book brings together artists who have been drawn to these unknown spheres and created curious artworks that transcend time and place. Whether you’re learning tarot, diving into the history of magical practice, or exploring Hermetic traditions, you need the visual language that goes with it. These works stem from a soul-deep desire for truth and awareness, revealing the hidden rules of nature and our world through imagery that has haunted and inspired across centuries.

Exploring Gothic aesthetics, melancholy, or the beauty of darkness?

The Art of Darkness is your visual companion. This book celebrates artists who have been obsessed with darkness throughout history—creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight, and play on our innermost fears. From dreams and nightmares to matters of mortality, from depravity and destruction to gods and monsters, these artworks indulge our greatest fears while asking: what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? If you’re studying Victorian mourning culture, exploring Gothic traditions, or simply trying to understand why certain aesthetics speak to something deep within you, this is your sourcebook. Denial of our darkness leads us to fear it….better to create a connection with our shadows and revel in all the inspiration and wonder we may find there!

Deep-diving into fantasy worldbuilding, mythology, or the fantastic?

The Art of Fantasy gives you the visual language. Artists have explored imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures for centuries, expressing the unreal and impossible, the mystical and mythical through paint and illustration. This book presents a compendium of artworks inspired by myth, fantasy, and the unreal—from beasts and beings to forgotten realms and wonderlands, from dreams and magic to faith and philosophy. If you’re studying folklore, reading epic fantasy, learning about mythological traditions across cultures, or working on your own creative worldbuilding, these visual flights of fancy and imagination show you how artists have conveyed the vast swathe of hopes and dreams in our collected hearts. Fantasy is not simply an escape from reality…it is the irresistible impulse that reveals hope and wonder in us all.

Why Visual Art Belongs in Your Curriculum

Whatever you’re studying, visual art deepens your understanding in ways that text alone cannot. It shows you how ideas manifest aesthetically, how concepts become tangible, how symbolism operates visually. The artists in these books are thinking deeply about their subjects, creating work that’s in conversation with history, mythology, spirituality, and culture across centuries.

If you’re building your own curriculum for any of these subjects, please don’t skip the visual component! These books are resources, and they’re meant to be referenced, returned to, absorbed alongside whatever else you’re studying.

And if you’re building a curriculum around something else entirely? Tell me about it. I want to know what you’re learning, what threads you’re following, what obsessions are driving your self-directed education. That’s always been my favorite kind of conversation!

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?

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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.

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?

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I don’t update it as often as I used to, but once a week or so, I used to share a round-up of new art from my favorite artists (or old art from new-to-me artists) and call it “Weekly Eyeball Fodder.” I eventually slowed the rate at which I posted these collections and realized it would be a bit disingenuous to keep calling it that, so I retired the frankly aspirational “Weekly” and changed it to “Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.” I sure wouldn’t want to be accused of false advertising!

It’s been a while since I’ve shared one of these galleries of visual inspiration, so today felt like a good day to resurrect the tradition… and this particular selection has a secret connecting thread. The works themselves don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another, except they all caught my eye (and yes, they’re all a bit weird and dark and spooky, but that’s what my eye is always drawn to, and that part doesn’t mean anything here!) The thread runs through the artists themselves. If you’ve been following along lately, especially as it relates to a certain upcoming project, you may already be able to crack the code.

Can you figure out what they all have in common?

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?

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For some reason, I got over 1,500 new followers on Instagram in the past two weeks, which is wild because, for the most part, I don’t even get 50 new followers in a year! I think it was because of the Nona Limmen art that I shared. Also, maybe the Machumayu post? Who knows! The vagaries of that app are profoundly elusive.

I thought it seemed like a good idea to leverage all those new eyeballs and do a “meet the author!” type of post, and share an inside peek at my new book… but what I did not take into account was that it would take me four freaking hours to create a fiddly, fussy thing about it in Canva, ugh! Now I feel like since I put all that work into making it, I gotta get a lot of bang for my buck and show it literally everywhere. So now I am making a blog post about it too, even though, ostensibly, you already know who I am.

But I am also sharing the first page, so even if you’re like, yeah, yeah, ok, we know who you are! Chances are, unless you were watching me over my shoulder like a weirdo creeper while I was writing this book, you haven’t read the first page yet!

Also, while you might know who I am…perhaps you might know some folks who do not, and if you search your heart further, it is possible these people might be into the idea of what I write about, and if we drill down into that even deeper, they might dig this very book? A  strange and sprawling book showcasing art that spans cosmic mysteries, hidden watchers, liminal spaces, restless souls, visionary states, and forgotten knowledge? Featuring nearly 200 artworks from artists across the centuries who spent their lives investigating the ineffable, bearing witness to the impossible, and attempting to give form to the inexpressible? I bet you know some weirdos who are into that sorta thing! And I would love it if you could share the good news with them!

Art on featured grid includes Virgo Paraiso, Pascal Dagnan- Bouvier, Wenzel Hablik, Richard Bober, Francisco Goya, and Anna Mond. Cover art by Linda Westin.

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There is no photograph of this, as far as I know. My mother is gone, and my grandfather Boppa, and my grandmother, and just about all of our elders, and whatever documentation existed of those years is in several boxes in my sister’s houses, and anyway, this was a picture never taken. But I don’t need a photograph. My memories of it are vivid enough…I just sometimes wish one existed so that I could have a bit of proof to show myself, see! See, you once did this!

Me and my sisters at the kitchen table, drawing paper, crayons, the serious bent-head posture of children doing extremely important work. We drew little people with their little clothes and little towns and elaborate little scenarios for them to inhabit, and we made our people talk in high-pitched voices that Boppa would tease us about every time he passed through the room. It was a super huge, major part of my childhood. I loved to draw!

In second grade, the illustration of my sneakers went up on the wall for parents’ night. In sixth grade, our art teacher asked us to draw our houses, and I, thinking aspirationally, kept sneaking glances at the tattered Amityville Horror paperback I’d hidden in my desk and drew that instead. The teacher was impressed, whether by my draftsmanship or my delusion, I can’t say.

And then, somewhere not long after that, I stopped.

There was a very specific moment. I was a kid who doodled everywhere: notebook margins, assignments, the brown paper bags we cut apart to cover our textbooks. One day, someone asked me what I was doing and why. I couldn’t explain it, and the question made me feel ashamed and strange, like I’d been caught doing something that required justification I didn’t have, and furthermore, I didn’t know I needed. The surest way to deter me from something is to embarrass the crap out of me. So I stopped, just like that.

I’ve caught myself thinking that I should have been encouraged to take art classes in middle school, high school, college, and I catch myself on that “should have” every time. What I guess I mean is that I wish someone had noticed something that gave me joy and said, keep going. Not really because I needed external permission to pursue it, but because I was a kid, and kids sometimes need someone to see them before they can see themselves.

Maybe this is how I eventually came to writing about art instead of making it. Art, like anything or maybe everything, is a practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If you don’t do it at all, the muscles atrophy, the instinct dwindles, and returning to it, or arriving at it for the first time, really, gets harder. I have known this for years. I have written around it for years. I love art so extravagantly, so helplessly, that I found my way to it through the door I knew how to open, which was language. I became someone who writes about the things I could not bring myself to make.

But there has always been something in me, some part of me that knows there is a marvelous, extraordinary thing inside and wants to let it out — and maybe that is drawing and maybe that is writing, and maybe I still don’t know what the creative hole even is that lets my light into the world.

When we moved to Jacksonville, we made new friends, and one of them gave me a box of secondhand creative supplies: stamps and stickers and journaling things, some of it never used. We started having craft days. I began in the shallow end, coloring books and zentangles, before deciding I was going to pursue my actual childhood dream, which was drawing flowers. I bought a lovely flower-drawing guide, collected tutorials, and I have been practicing for months now. Alongside those kaleidoscopic zentangles. Cut-and-paste surrealist poetry collages. Decorative journaling.

I tried to go slow at first. (as this was meant to be developing a practice, not acquiring a collection, and I know how my brain works when it comes to gathering supplies as opposed to using supplies.) I will admit the journal stack has grown exponentially, and I have gone from someone who didn’t own a single marker to someone who now has half a dozen boxes of them… and also colored pencils and watercolors and pastels (So, you know. “Slow.” Hehehe.)

Another thing I started doing that makes it not scary for me: I am a quasi-hermit who doesn’t do much, which means my daily planner has historically contained entries like “take pills, pay bills, wear sunscreen.” Not exactly a rich chronicle. But on the same page alongside the basic to-do list, I’ve started doing a small illustration a day, practicing what I’ve been learning in a low-stakes way, because it’s just a doodle in a planner and not expensive art paper, which is really intimidating! Just a little drawing next to “lift weights.” (Which somehow never gets crossed off the list.) It keeps me in the practice without the pressure of treating it like capital-A Art.

I know it sounds cheesy, but…my life has felt richer? if that’s the right word? these past few months. Getting over yourself, all the inexplicable shame and embarrassment, and flabby, languishing art muscles, is a hell of a thing, and working on these projects is fun and freeing. In a way that writing (which I love and hate in equal measure sometimes) is absolutely, definitively not.

Last week, Yvan and I were watching something on YouTube when Lucy needed to go outside to pee, or poop, or perform some unknown third dog operation, and when we came back in, he asked if I wanted to keep watching. No, I had to get back to my project. “My art is very important,” I loftily informed him.

Yvan nodded sagely (because he is on my level and he gets it.) “That sounds like something you should write about,” he said. He’s right. But immediately after I do, I am gonna draw a flower about it, too.

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?

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Last summer I wrote a blog post musing on the green slime that got unceremoniously dumped on your head if you uttered the words “I don’t know.” (80s babies remember You Can’t Do That On Television, right?)

If at the time you read it and thought, this feels like it’s going somewhere … you were right. That was a plant. A deliberate, sneaky little entree designed to get you thinking about uncertainty and not-knowing, so that when I finally announced this, you might feel the satisfaction of having seen it coming.

So. Here it is.

The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny, and Unexplained is my fourth book, following The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, and it publishes September 1st from Frances Lincoln/Quarto.

This book has been a long time coming, and it grew from a handful of frustrations that had been rattling around in my head for years. People I know, generally smart and interesting people, making shit up rather than simply saying “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.” Decades of images circulating on Tumblr and Pinterest and a thousand fashion blogs captioned “artist unknown,” and nobody bothering to wonder who or taking a few seconds to search around. The creeping cultural sense that not knowing something is either A. just the way it goes because it’s too hard to find an answer or B. a failure best not admitted, rather than a starting point to find potentiall something really cool.

And then there was the Richard Bober mystery. Some of you were there for it! In 2023 I wrote a blog post about a A Wrinkle in Time paperback cover I had been obsessed with for years, lurid, hypersaturated, genuinely nightmare-inducing, and could not for the life of me find an artist credit for. That post took on a life of its own: Reddit ran wild with it, WBUR’s Endless Thread podcast picked it up, the New York Times covered it, and eventually the mystery was solved. The artist was Richard Bober. I wanted that image for The Art of Fantasy but couldn’t use it because I didn’t know who made it until after the book was published

Well, guess what friends? It’s in this book!!!

Mystery, curiosity, the refusal to shrug and move on, and the extraordinary things that happen when you sit with and marinate in the not-knowing long enough to let it become something. That’s what this book is about.

Twelve chapters. Four parts. Forces Beyond, Realms Between, Remnants, Relics and Revelations, and The Human Mystery: cosmic forces and hidden watchers, parallel worlds and liminal spaces, restless souls and forgotten knowledge, visionary states and sacred cycles. Everything that lives at the edges of what we can explain, and the artists who went looking for it anyway.

Inside its pages: Wenzel Hablik painting the cosmos like a living, crystalline, pulsing thing. Agnes Pelton alone in her converted windmill, layering gossamer veils of translucent color until her surfaces pulse with starlight. Jan Konůpek building cosmic architecture that follows dream logic rather than physics. Ionel Talpazan, Romanian refugee and self-appointed ambassador between worlds, devotedly documenting extraterrestrial craft in feverish techno-spiritual blueprints that are part technical manual, part cosmic philosophy. Léon Spilliaert on his nocturnal wanderings through a desolate seaside town, drawing staircases that spiral into the abyss until your inner ear and your intrusive thoughts reach perfect, terrible agreement.

Louise Bourgeois transforming the human torso into a living panopticon, a constellation of watching eyes. Pamela Colman Smith painting what music looked like to her, unlocking what she called “a beautiful country” that existed somewhere between her ear and her eye. Penny Slinger, feminist Surrealist, starring in her own ghost story as both haunter and haunted. Frida Kahlo splitting herself into two competing identities on a lonely bench against churning skies, blood spilling onto pristine fabric, both faces maintaining identical, unnerving composure. Which version of ourselves do we nurture, and which do we allow to bleed away?

And many, many more artists and creators who have ventured into the realms of the impossible and ineffable and returned with field notes from the other side of whatever it is we think we know.

The front cover is Linda Westin’s staggeringly sublime work. Infrared photography revealing colors that exist beyond human sight. A shadowy Swedish forest where the branches create a perfect oculus. A lush, kaleidoscopic vortex of a thing that feels less like a photograph of a forest and more like what a forest dreams about itself.

The back cover is Nona Limmen, whose photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget. That figure on the staircase, enshrouded in diaphanous white, five candles held aloft in the dark. It feels less like art and more like evidence. (If you haven’t read my recent  profile of her work, that’s your next stop!)

Both artists appear inside the book alongside hundreds of others spanning centuries and cultures, and I’ll be introducing them properly over the coming weeks and months. They trusted me with their work, and I am so deeply grateful.

…Now, can we talk about pre-orders for a moment?

I know it can feel like a small gesture, clicking a button months before a book arrives, but I want to be honest with you about what it actually does, because it matters more than most people realize. Pre-orders are counted in a book’s first-week sales figures, and that first week is disproportionately important. It’s the number that tells booksellers how many copies to stock, that signals to publishers whether a book has momentum, that influences everything from front-of-store placement to whether an author gets offered another contract. The algorithm that determines visibility on retail sites weights early sales heavily. A strong pre-order showing can mean the difference between a book that gets hand-sold by booksellers who believe in it and one that  disappears.

Publishers don’t promote books the way most people imagine. The work of actually getting this book in front of readers is on me. That’s on most authors, at every level. If this book, or any of my books, has ever meant something to you, pre-ordering is the single most effective thing you can do to help it find the readers it’s looking for. More than sharing, more than reviewing, more than telling a friend, though please also do all of those things.

The pre-order link is here (and peppered liberally throughout this post, as I am sure you have noticed). Thank you, genuinely, for being here for all of it.

I went down so many deliriously art-drenched, visually stupefying, aesthetically overwhelming rabbit holes while researching this book, and like any good rabbit hole, The Art of the Unknown will not offer certainty or even clarity. That’s not what you go down one for. (At least that’s not why I go down rabbit holes! I go to get lost!)

Anyway, what it will offer you instead is wonder — and wonder, I’ve come to believe, is the better deal.

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Somewhere, there is a mythic, lachrymose storybook from another world, and machumaYu is its illustrator and caretaker, both. They tend their inhabitants the way one tends a terrarium of singular, precious creatures: with patience, with devotion, with a face pressed to the glass, cataloguing every ceremony, every migration, every small and serious life within.

Inside, the cast goes about its business with complete solemnity: foxes and goats and wolves deep in their appointed tasks — a gloomier, more arcane Busytown, every creature with a purpose, every purpose shrouded in mystery — small cloaked figures gathering around volcanoes and caged lions, children sealed inside glass flasks, animal-headed scholars presiding over books and globes and celestial instruments.

I was deep in the “Imagery And Inspiration Of The Elements” chapter of The Art of the Occult when machumaYu’s work found me, the way certain things on Tumblr have always had an uncanny instinct for finding exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

A curious blue dog-girl hybrid sealed inside a glass flask, guarded by a winged, scaled creature and a watchful cloud, disembodied figures drifting through sky above a medieval castle, each wearing a different head , tree, sun, flame. I knew immediately I was looking at just one mythology among many in someone’s expansive, fully inhabited, weird, weird world.

machumaYu’s inhabitants do not know they are being watched, or if they do, they have decided it is of no matter to them. A rabbit cycles a unicycle while playing piano, reaching for the keys with total concentration. Small white-robed figures hover in solemn a circle around a caged lion wreathed in flame, themselves ensconced in a larger wheel, part of a strange cycle. An owl-headed scholar, his body composed of stacked books, holds open a text with both hands as though the answer to something urgent is in there somewhere.

None of this is played for laughs. None of it invites you to find it absurd. And yet there is something in the cumulative weight of all this earnest, diligent strangeness, creatures going about their ancient business with the focused gravity of beings who have never once questioned the logic of their world, that produces in the viewer a feeling adjacent to a gentle fondness, adjacent to amusement, but not quite either. Something warmer and more complicated than both.

machumaYu’s world did not begin when you arrived. It feels conceived in a candlelit scriptorium by someone with a melancholic disposition and an extensive knowledge of folklore, deeply committed to alchemy and the collective unconscious, and indeed it has centuries behind it, ancient myths, founding narratives, lost histories of characters whose names have dissolved into time.

The Rohm Founding Myth gives us a many-horned goat presiding over a jagged rock formation encrusted with the ruins of a miniature city, two armored figures riding an enormous wolf below, an old-world map hovering in the sky above like a record of territories long since forgotten.

Universe assembles four animal-headed figures around a root-limbed child at the center of a circular fortress, a deer holding scales, a lion clutching a book, a hare with a crystal ball, a figure whose head has become a tangle of branches, as though we have stumbled into the founding ceremony of something that will long outlast us. And yet this world is not only ancient history; it has its own living present, its own seasonal rituals and natural laws.

In The Night Party of Flowers, a doll-like girl cradles a lizard beneath lush, oversized blooms that dwarf the surrounding trees, a flower with a human face presiding at her side, a human figure with a blossom head, accompanied by an accordian, and In Death and Life: The Cycle, three animal skulls rest on the ground amid mushrooms and small plants while swirling vines wrap themselves around fox and owl and hummingbird alike, the whole composition a tender and unhurried account of everything that ends and everything that follows.

The same figures return across machumaYu’s paintings like characters in a story that has no single beginning and no fixed end. Lions and deer, foxes and hares, wolves and leopards, children with enormous solemn eyes. They migrate from painting to painting, appearing in new configurations, new landscapes, as though their lives continue between canvases in rooms we cannot see.

They move through a world rendered in the muted, dimmed palette of something viewed through old glass or remembered imperfectly — ochre and ash and pewter, the occasional bruised blue, colors that feel a little moth-eaten and weather-beaten, dusk, and shadowed and eternally overcast.

And everywhere, containers: glass flasks holding girls and unicorns, domes enclosing entire ecosystems, circular structures, armillary spheres, globes. machumaYu is drawn to the world within the world, the small and sovereign place inside the larger one, which is perhaps why their paintings feel less like windows and more like diminutive vivariums: controlled and enclosed, rare and self-sustaining behind glass, breathing its own air, following its own ancient rules.

machumaYu calls it “bright darkness,” and spending time in this world they have built, you understand just what they mean. There’s a lonely, dolorous undercurrent running beneath everything in this fanciful ecosystem, and yet there is warmth here too, and tenderness, and something that sits just beside a droll whimsy without ever quite becoming comical, and none of these things resolve into each other or cancel each other out. They companionably coexist, the way they do in the deepest parts of the human interior.

machumaYu keeps vigil over this world they have built with the attention of someone who built it from nothing and knows every corner of it, keeping faithful watch over the brightness and the darkness in careful, equal measure.

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?

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