Unquiet
Things

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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I recently arrived home from some travels with a spectacularly awful head cold. Ugh! I have been wanting to write up a little travel report to share on the blog here, but have just been feeling too listless and unmotivated to even think about it. (I will say, however, that it involved a night with Florence!)

Last night, in a sleepless delirium of fever, it occurred to me that I have a book coming out in four months’ time and I am out here thinking about posting dumb personal stuff like a gormless chump — when I should be hyping up my newest artsy fartsy book offering!

So, here’s a thing I made for social media book marketing, and I am afraid I must subject it to you all, as well. (Mostly because it took me about four hours to make the above graphic in Canva, hehehe! A designer, I am not.)

Are YOU drawn to the art and imagery at the edges of things? The unexplained? The esoteric? The forces that persist just beyond the threshold of ordinary reality?

Do you find yourself awake at 3am thinking about parallel worlds? Visionary states? Liminal spaces? Cosmic mysteries? Restless souls? Forgotten knowledge? Sacred cycles? Corporeal energies?

Friends. FRIENDS. Have I got the book for you.

Introducing The Art of the Unknown: nearly 200 works by artists across the centuries who looked at what science couldn’t explain and picked up a brush. Painting. Photographing. Diagramming. Their way toward forces and phenomena that defy comprehension.

But WAIT. There’s more.

For the low, low price of whatever your local bookseller is charging, you too can own a visual treasury of the esoteric, the uncanny, and the unexplained. That’s right. It could be yours.

And if you order in the next fifteen minutes …okay well, you can’t, it’s not out until September, but the preorder link is here, and I cannot stress enough how much I would like you to click it.

Call now. Operators are standing by. I am the operator. I am also standing by.

(This unhinged inanity brought to you by the very busy graphic I made that reminded me of late 80s infomercials for paranormal book collections and psychic hotlines. And also the woo woo advertising nostalgia I remember for things like the Pure Moods cd, which incidentally,  I listened to while I was visiting Philly.)

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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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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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