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Oracles and Phantasms of Caitlin McCarthy

Caitlin McCarthy is one of the artists whose prints I have the most of in my home. They are eminently frameable, hangable, and delightful. I love her goddess series, which renders feminine deities and figures of folklore from across the world in concise and whimsical portraits. Her drawings also feature characters from horror films, Gothic authors, and Spiritualists. As McCarthy states on her Website, she is fascinated by “Victorian sensibilities and the occult,” and her work portrays “visions of dark dreamy women in the form of seers, mystics, goddesses, and witches.”

McCarthy’s graphite illustrations have an eerie and ethereal feel, sometimes dark, sometimes darling. I like the radiance that comes across in some of her monochromatic works, the sense of an otherworldly glow, and a certain wispy quality, being able to see the strokes of the pencil. The ribbons of ectoplasm that curl out, seance-style, from some of the entranced figures, are also appealing to me. These women’s eyes often appear blind but perhaps gifted with an inner sight. Amidst lit candles floating in midair, in their pointed hats, veils, and headdresses, they dream on in their melancholy bliss.

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Precious Weapons: Jewelry by Ossia Obscure

Dublin-based Ossia Obscure handcrafts beautiful pieces of jewelry, taking the shapes of medieval and ancient weapons, as well as forms in nature and symbols of magic. Among these designs there is a witch’s broomstick, Nordic runes, a cat skull, a pomegranate, teeth and bones, chalices, Celtic battleaxes, and a spiked mace. Saoirse at Ossia Obscure creates new versions of these artifacts, drawing inspiration from fantasy, Gothic imagery, and medieval cultures. Fancifully designed and meticulously crafted, these miniature tools and weapons are each a unique marvel. I love the little details on them, the textures and irregularities. Although they depict brutal and crude objects, I feel that they have a wonderfully quaint, almost friendly look to them.

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Dolls by DD-Anne

The incredible ball-jointed dolls of DD-Anne express strength through fragility. Exquisite and ethereal, long-limbed, pure, they exude a special grace, an elegance touched with tragedy. There is an allegorical quality to them, illustrating poetic ideas in a three-dimensional and miniature form.

In her Alice in Underland series, she reconceptualizes the Queen of Hearts in a bold and marvelous way, taking inspiration from the Venus flytrap. The clothes and shoes for these little incarnations of the Victorian tale are sculptural and astonishing in their level of detail.

Meticulously crafted, DD-Anne’s dolls are delicate, beautiful, and thought-provoking. Her sewing skills and sense of design are formidable, resulting in creations that are wonderfully expressive and truly memorable. Lovely and visionary, these dolls embody an inner drama with splendor and clarity.

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Tender Chimera: The Art of Takuya Mitani

Takuya Mitani creates delicate, detailed paintings portraying mysterious youths in a chimerical state. Accompanied by a myriad of strange creatures, flowers, emblematic objects such as Eden-like apples, mystical and heraldic imagery, they seem surreally transforming, or merging into their noble and enigmatic accoutrements. These symbols and articles revolve around and halo the lovely, tranquil beings whose very placidity seems to belie sinister interior layers. There are birds and rabbits and horses, as well as chimerae with their fantastical hybrid forms, and the subjects, too, seem chimerical, always transfigured, metamorphosing, or, as it were, marred by a grotesque yet ethereal blending with other elements in the images. There is also a motif of angels, with arched wings indicating a strange divinity for these tender youthful beings. Meticulously drawn, complexly composed, rendered with an eye to detail and a careful realism, Mitani’s paintings with their almost pretty air are provoking and lulling, combining an intriguing, soft, otherworldly aspect with historical and surrealistic elements.

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[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] Alejandra Pizarnik

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night.
All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone. {See more}

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Luminous Procuress: The Photography of Steven Arnold

Steven Arnold’s playful and electrifying tableaux vivants incorporated elements from silent film, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Surrealism, and mysticism. His assemblages are whimsical, sharply contrasting, and delightful for a lover of film history. They are musingly clever and dreamy, evident of a masterful and fantastic touch. These stark black-and-white images exude a quality of theatricality and wild expressiveness, a sense of mischievous quixoticism, which is so striking as well as charming. I wish there were more contemporary artists like the late Steven Arnold. His wonderful photographs put me in mind of a still version of the work of filmmaker Guy Maddin.

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Mary Syring

Mary Syring is one of my favorite artists in recent years, and I have many of her prints in my home. Her very recognizable style draws inspiration from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the 1920s, Spiritualism, horror movies, folk tales, and New England Halloween aesthetics. Endearing, piquant, and elegant, Syring’s illustrations are wispy and sinuous, giving a sense of daintiness along with a mysterious, enchanted savor of ghostliness. The beautifully coifed ladies, specters, vampires, and witches that inhabit her drawings are sweet, a little bit eerie, often sapphic, and invested with the poetic aesthetics of bygone eras. Candles, graceful little hands, ectoplasm, scythes and winged hourglasses are recurring elements in her work. The pretty demureness of Syring’s diminutive figures juxtaposes with the themes of death, passion, mourning, horror, and the supernatural. I love the ornate vignettes full of flowers which frame some of her images; they embellish them in such an interesting and lovely way.

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Morgaine Faye’s Armory

The Armory Collection by jeweler Morgaine Faye features gauntlets, escutcheons, daggers, Lucerne hammers, morningstars, as well as an array of medieval weaponry and iconography including swifts and castle towers. The creation of these knightly pieces involves techniques traditionally used in armor- and weapons-making (forging, engraving, colored inlay, riveting, hidden kinetic components), forming a collection of charms, chains, pendants, and rings that can be layered and combined, giving them versatility as well as historical inspiration.

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FIVE IV by E. E. Cummings

if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

— ee cummings