Acquiring a villainous little blanket-stealing gremlin wasn’t on my list of 2026 goals, but the universe is a wily rascal sometimes.
This is Lucy. She is my in-laws’ little guy but they are struggling to care for her, time and attention-wise, as their health continues to decline. She’s been staying with us off and on over the years when they traveled , but as of this morning it has officially become a more permanent situation. Lucy is a grand old dame herself, I think she’s 13-14! Any readers or friends who have elderly puppy knowledge, stories, whatever, I would love to hear about them, please share!
I have never considered myself a “dog person” (but I have also never considered myself a jazz/bath/crafty person, and look what’s happened! More on some of that stuff soon.) So what do I know, anyway?
Meet the Stinker Spotlight, where I’m chatting with one of my Patreon supporters each month. I’ve never been particularly good at building community on Patreon—I’m not a Discord person, I don’t encourage people to mingle—so I thought this might be a way to actually get to know each other.
Kicking things off with Heather Vee, a fellow magpie whose interests span historical romance, darkwave, occult studies, color theory, and perfume. We talk first perfume memories, current obsessions (Heated Rivalry, anyone?), and the scent she’d conjure into existence.
Are you a supporter of my Midnight Stinks Patreon? You’re here for a reason; perfume, yes, but also something else… and I want to know what that is! Your stories, your obsessions, the way you move through the world. I want to sit with your strange and specific loves and the corners of culture you’ve made your own. I want to share your story with all the other Stinkers here, and I’d love to feature you next! Hit me up via DM, Instagram, or email.
What do a marshmallow pipecleaner Tuxedo Mask, Darkman the Lepidopterist, a cobalt devil girl from Mars with her in-utero cannibalized twin emerging at the wrist, and a molten gold icon with a sword stabbed through its heart but still looking fabulous, all have in common?
Aside from all stalking the runway at Robert Wun S/S26, they’re also visions only this designer could have brought to life. And at the very heart of this show is staying true to your vision, no matter how strange or impossible. No matter how hard the world works to convince you it’s pointless, to question its purpose, to reduce it to product.
Robert Wun orchestrated his Spring 2026 couture collection as three acts of a designer’s reckoning. Library gave us black and white restraint, precise forms of grandiose ideas delicately rendered from his student sketchbooks. Luxury confronted us with the uncomfortable truth about value, when pure ideals meet crass commerce—crystal masks obscuring the face, gowns tailored like high-jewelry display stands. And finally, Valor: mythology and metallic armor, swords piercing through the body, a celestial ballgown holding the entire cosmos.
Against the tumult and chaos of a digital thunderstorm, he revealed the importance of dreaming when dreams seem impossible, of holding onto what made you want to create in the first place when the world pressures you to compromise, of fighting for art in a world that questions whether art matters at all.
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Kolomon Moser, plate from “Die Quelle” portfolio. 1900
Arielle Shoshana x Michelle Visage Wednesday Helena Blavatsky on a wilderness retreat, divining the eternal mysteries through campfire ash with a spindly stalk of celery. Occult celery, theosophical vegetable. Investigating unexplained laws of Nature, the truth within the bitter ribs. Humble soup stock vegetation as messenger between worlds. Smoky pinewood/cedary outdoor incense curling around paradoxical aqueous/empyreumatic heart, enrobed in sweet, camphorous honey, cinched with crisp herbaceous green strings. Smoked offerings minus the charred flesh, channeling divine wisdom through fibrous green wands. Finding eternal essence in a produce bin bonfire, whether we call it God or Nature or High Priestess of Camp Celery. An extremely peculiar and exceedingly perfect conduit of otherworldly revelations and one of the most unique things I have ever added to my perfume collection.
Maison Crivelli Iris Malikhân The opening from the sprayer releases something akin to a decrepit lightning bolt locked in a dusty crypt. Sharp, electric decay, musty current, moth-eaten voltage. Then…a bit of shadowy aromatic lycanthropy, and it’s again what I thought I loved. A phantasmagoric zoetrope, a being resembling a Maria Germanova-type, shapeshifting through theatrical roles, a noble lady draped in jewels, a swaggering pirate, a beggar woman cloaked in rags, an avant-garde fairy in Stanislavski’s embodiment of The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck. Ghostly photographs, the specters haunting antique cartes de visite. At turns, powdery, leathery, metallic, vegetal, austere, sophisticated. Moscow Art Theatre witch-queen caught mid-transformation, glamorous and gloomy, enigmatic and a bit unsettling.
Obvious Parfums Un Musc Haruka Tenou energy, chilly sporty musk. Willowy sapphic athletics. Crisp androgynous elegance in fluttering white tennis shorts. Ginger brightness competing against vetiver earthiness, canceling each other out, whittling down to dank earthworm glow. A weakened Sailor Uranus attack – Minor Phosphorescent Subterranean Flicker! or Weakened Subsoil Incandescence Rustle! or something like that! Muted radiance, cool, composed, understated power…or not even power exactly. Powered up, but on a dimmer switch. (Somewhat similar to my thoughts on Glossier You, but more singularly Uranus – no Neptune softness here, just that elegant solo energy.)
EPC Velvet IncenseThe melted-down essence of an entire perfume collection in a cauldron – harmonized, reduced, cohesive. Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle, that vaporous pillar of smoke rising from glowing depths, flames crackling with magic and power. In my book The Art of Fantasy, I admired this work, noting the conspiracy of ravens looking on with menacing curiosity from beyond the symbolic ring, the landscape glowering claustrophobically with ominous intent – but inside the circle, equilibrium. Ambery cedar exhaling cool, crisp pepperiness – not “spiced” heat but sharp, bright, almost mentholated edge cutting through resinous warmth. Muted, velveteen ambery-sandalwoody sweetness, thick and plush, wrapping around that cedar spine like soft fabric pulled taut. Everything finding its place in the spell. My perfume cabinet already smells like this … which means I don’t need this fragrance… but also means I absolutely understand its appeal.
Arquiste NocturnalityA canned neon energy drink cocktail crushed under the heel of a Jeffrey Campbell boot circa 2013, slick neoprene shine and sculptural platform weight, sticky fluorescent syrup pooling underneath. A stiff pleather jacket draped nearby, late 90s cheap-chic sheen, rubbery and glossy and fruity, an early-evening synthetic glamour. Fluorescent shimmer catching light. Acidic citrus bruised against latex. Chemical gleam mixing with something vaguely floral, a sharp luminosity, its glow all edges. The fruity bits abandon ship, no goodbye, just gone home, shimmied up trellises and through cracked suburban windows, meanwhile, the real party starts. What remains is animalic and feral, musks and patchouli sprawling like they own the place, earthy and musky and undeniably alive, and a little undead in that unsettling way that makes you unsure whether you’re smelling something or becoming something. It smells like Dead and Beautiful, a 2021 Chinese vampire film about five gorgeous, obscenely wealthy friends so jaded by excess that they embark on increasingly extravagant and dangerous expeditions just to feel something. After a disorienting encounter with a shaman deep in the jungle, they awaken transformed, vampires…or perhaps the spell merely reveals what was already festering beneath the Valentino and the cheekbones. Cedar grounding the animalic chaos, cool and austere, against the earthy, confrontational patchouli. Something resinous underneath, a smoky, slightly ritualistic quality, like witnessing something you shouldn’t in the dark, and then pretending you haven’t been changed by it. The aromatic evidence of what happens when beautiful people do beautiful, terrible things. By the end, it’s all leather-bound mysteries and the ghost of neon bleeding through, that downtown after-hours underbelly where the loss of self in intoxication becomes indistinguishable from revelation, clinging to skin like a confession or a curse.
FZOTIC Ummagumma Have you ever been eating chocolate, maybe some single-origin, maybe Ecuadorian chocolate, so intensely dark and aromatically bitter with like zero percent cocoa butter and no sugar? It really doesn’t even taste like chocolate anymore, it’s a bit punitive actually (but in an okay way?) And you thought, hey, you know what this chocolate needs is a few grinds, twenty or so, from the teakwood pepper grinder, spicy and textured and gritty. A handful of cedar shavings, bright and dry and papery. A new pair of high-quality, stiff leather boots. I certainly never thought that either, so I guess that makes two of us, and shame on us for our profound lack of vision. Because this is both rich and austere, intense and accessible, and there’s an additional salty balsamic smokiness that makes it really, really interesting.
Aphrodite’s Breakfast Creamy French toast from inside a lilac fairytale, cardamom-spiced, lost in the raspberry wood, a flask of green tea on your belt, astringent and clarifying.
Weighted Blanket A tiny creature hollowing out a plump, moist, sticky date and lining it with vanilla-scented cottony spider webs. Cozy but insular. Intimate and contained. A cocoon of richly spiced-sweetness.
Comfort What is the collective noun for a movement of moth wings? A tremor? A pulse? A dusting of something precious catching the light, an herbal sarsparilla coolness, a shimmer of vanilla powder, a half-remembered breath of spice from the threadcount of dreams.
Dolce Far Niente POV: You are the brittle cookie, strange-spiced-sweet and chocolate-laced, inside the silver house-shaped tin. Parting the embossed curtains, against the glass panes of an aluminum row house, you watch a middle-aged person creak cross-legged under the tree, bathed in 80s Christmas bulbs, electric sharp, plastic-bright. The lights catch the tin’s edges, refract the nostalgia and crystalize to crumbs. a mass-produced sweetness that tastes like wonder and sugar and joy.
Glimmers Overgrown satyr sauna, shadows of warmth in wintry desolation. Cloven hooves in the dust. Dry spicy kindling, feral musk lingering in the cold air. Pine needles scattered across the floor, cedar beams dark and skeletal. A phantom fire burning long ago.
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…As one grew bright as is the sun, So coal black grew the elder one…
In Schiaparelli’s Spring 2026 couture, Daniel Roseberry presents The Scorpion Sisters. One might imagine a murder ballad threaded through it—the bright one in transparent chiffon, a bustier where the scorpion tail is embroidered in delicate bas-relief, almost childlike, held festooned with an innocence of posies. The dark one draped in black crin and chantilly, predatory, silver needles bristling, white lace ruffles like innocence cloaking something venomous.
What jealousy lives between them? Which one drowns the other—the one who learned to sting, or the one who learned to shine? Roseberry doesn’t tell us. He just places them side by side on the runway. Daydream and nightmare, the poison and the cure.
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We’re having our annual (though not always guaranteed) spate of cold weather – some nights dipping into the 20s – and I am luxuriating in the opportunity for coziness. Florida doesn’t give us much chance for proper bundling, for heavy blankets and hot baths that steam up the bathroom, for the kind of evenings where you sink into soft clothes and don’t emerge until morning. I will say, though, that Jacksonville (being a little further north than where we were previously near Daytona) seems to provide a few more chilly days? But anyway, when the cold arrives, I seize it completely.
Here are five things making these chilly nights perfect.
BED LINENS
I finally curated the perfect combination of colors and textures for my bed, and climbing into it every night feels deeply satisfying. Earthy pastels – sage and plum and slate, colors I don’t have a proper name for but that feel grounded and calm without being boring.
The linen sheets have that particular weight and coolness that only gets better with washing, the kind that makes you want to slip between them even in summer. The quilt has pick stitching, tiny running stitches creating geometric patterns across the surface, texture you can feel when you run your hand over it. I’d been looking for something with a sashiko vibe, and this is…kinda it? Another blanket, because I am a bit extra: a paisley handblock-print cotton quilt. and the gauzy duvet on top, light but warm, slightly wrinkled in that French country-house way.
Without trying to sound dramatic, or like I’ve cured cancer or something, it took years to get here, trying different combinations, replacing things one piece at a time until everything coordinated without looking coordinated. Now, when I pull back the covers at night, the whole setup looks exactly right and feels even better, substantial without being heavy, soft without being precious.
LIGHTING
These plug into the wall and look like little candle sconces, flickering LED flames that cast warm shadows up the wall. They’re not just for night; I leave them on during gray afternoons too, that gentle glow making everything feel softer around the edges.
I also have a diffuser/dehumidifier (seen in the featured image for this blog post, on my nightstand) that I’ve pretty much totally repurposed. I never use it for humidity or essential oils; instead, I run the white noise function, a droning, celestial chanting sound that my brain finds deeply soothing, and keep the changing color mood lighting on all day. It cycles through soft glows, lavender fading into pale blue into soft amber, shifting the room’s atmosphere without being too bright or wild.
The sconces give just enough light to move around at night without jarring you awake, and together with the diffuser’s slowly changing colors, the rooms feel like they’re breathing.
COLORING BOOKS
It took me a long time to get into coloring. The idea of it made me stupidly anxious, all that pressure to stay in the lines, to make good color choices, to not mess it up. But I kind of get it now, the appeal of structured creativity where you don’t have to generate ideas from nothing. The Flower Year by Leila Duly is such a treat for the eyes, full of intricate Victorian-style etchings of flowers and birds and butterflies, each page different enough that it never feels repetitive. There are full-page illustrations and double-page spreads, little collections of single flowers with their botanical names, quotes about the seasons scattered throughout.
I work on it in the evenings, a few pages at a time, and it quiets my brain in ways that reading sometimes doesn’t. Although funny enough, I listen to horror novel audiobooks while I am doing it, hehehe!
COMFY EVENING CLOTHES
The softest greige hoodie from the Asheville Botanical Garden, heavy Adidas sweatpants that are two sizes too big, and my favorite socks in the world: the Girlfriend Socks from Le Bon Shoppe. They’re thick and cozy, crew length, perfect for padding around the house, and I think I have every color they sell.
This is not a pretty, glamorous, or sexy evening getup, but I truly do not give a shit. When the temperature drops, I want to disappear into soft fabric and not think about how I look.
HOT BATHS
I wrote about this recently, how I became a bath person seemingly overnight, how the scalding water makes me think of that Russian plumber’s observation about women preparing for Hell. The ritual of it has become essential to my evenings. Candles, magnesium flakes, onsen essential oils, bath milk, water as hot as I can stand it. I emerge red as a lobster, steaming, and immediately into those oversized sweatpants.
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Most nights around 11 p.m., I’m watching a stranger’s scalp get massaged in extreme close-up. Fingers working through wet hair, nails scratching patterns across skin, the soft scrape of a wooden comb. Or I’m watching someone’s spine getting adjusted, the therapist’s hands finding each vertebra, that moment of pressure before the crack, the satisfying pop of joints realigning. Or a woman named WhispersRed is tucking an invisible person (me) into bed, smoothing imaginary blankets with deliberate strokes, whispering that everything’s going to be okay while fabric rustles and pillows get fluffed.
Sometimes it’s ear cleaning videos where tiny tools scrape and tap inside silicone ears. Sometimes it’s someone slowly brushing their hair for thirty minutes, each stroke amplified to an almost obscene degree. I cycle through my favorites, zenheads, tokyo asmr massage, mondragon chiropractic, itsblitzz’s gentle massage work, asmr twix, little me carmie. I guess I’m hunting for the off-switch my brain doesn’t have, and these videos are the closest thing I’ve found.
I’ve been doing this for years now. ASMR videos, those autonomous sensory meridian response tingles that start at your scalp and travel down your spine when you hear certain sounds.
A lot of ASMR is someone tapping their fingernails on objects for twenty minutes straight, or whispering directly into a microphone in a dark room. That doesn’t work for me. I need the sounds to be part of something, incorporated into an activity. The click of scissors trimming hair. The squelch of shampoo being worked into a lather. The snap of a fresh towel being unfolded. The rhythmic scrape of a pumice stone on a heel. Sounds that happen because someone is doing something – usually care or grooming related – not just performing sounds for their own sake (which I’ll agree here with the haters, this is actually kinda annoying and obnoxious.)
Then, a few months ago, I stumbled across a clip from John Waters’ Serial Mom while scrolling late at night. I am pretty sure you know the scene: Beverly Sutphin is watching her son’s friend’s family through their window, eating a roast chicken dinner. The camera zooms in on wet mouths tearing at greasy meat, lips smacking, tongues working over chicken skin, throats swallowing audibly. Sounds designed to be absolutely revolting.
And I thought: …wait. I’m kind of into this?
That’s when things started to click, and all the lightbulbs went on, all at once. A cascade of realization!
Those Serial Mom sounds were the same ones putting me into a trance every night. And then: oh god, how many horror movie sounds had I been responding to this way my entire life? Freddy’s finger knives scraping metal railings. Michael Myers’ breathing behind his mask. Shower curtain rings sliding. The rhythmic tick of a clock in an empty house. Every creaking floorboard in every haunted house.
Horror had been doing ASMR before ASMR had a name.
Once I saw the connection, I couldn’t unsee it. I started making mental lists of horror sounds that gave me tingles and began to wonder if other horror fans experienced this too… or if I was just weird and freaky? I started thinking about how horror directors have been manipulating intimate audio space for decades, long before YouTube ASMRtists figured out the same trick. And that’s when I knew I had an article for Rue Morgue!
P.S. The header image for this post is from a 2018 video I wish I had stumbled across when I was doing research for the piece – Lucy Hale (Aria from Pretty Little Liars, though if you already recognized her I probably didn’t need to tell you that) doing ASMR recreations of horror movie sounds to promote Truth or Dare. She stabs a pumpkin for Halloween, types “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” on a typewriter for The Shining, rubs lotion on her hands for Silence of the Lambs. PLL AND ASMR! Total dream come true! Someone at W Magazine understood the connection between horror and ASMR way before I did. Dangit!
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I have put together a truly elite, like God-tier (some kind of god, anyway)-level marinade this month. Occult, arcane, infernal. Incense and resins out the wazoo. A bit of celery and moss. A lot of shadow and dark, dark poetry. All the good things.
When I was writing The Art of the Occult, I wanted to balance the inherited iconography and established visual language of Western esotericism with work that felt genuinely outside that vocabulary. Alison Blickle was one of those voices.
Cloak, Alison Blickle
The Visitor, Alison Blickle
What struck me immediately was a sumptuous fashion editorial sensibility threading through ritual and ceremony. Women in carefully composed spaces, draped in patterned garments, surrounded by carved faces and vessels, and sculptural forms. Gold, jewel tones, intricate patterns catching light. Textile with actual weight and drape.
Her rendering gives you access to their consciousness. You read them as thinking, feeling beings, not as symbols or poses. These rituals carry the visual richness usually reserved for haute couture or classical painting. The paintings hold actual movement, light, shifting bodies, gestures between the women, something being passed or witnessed. Something shifting.
I’ve been watching her work shift ever since.
Medusa about to turn all of the men on the internet to stone, Alison Blickle
Stone Phone, Alison Blickle
Attack, Alison Blickle
Slaying, Alison Blickle
In the years that followed, her work deepened into that mythology, but something shifted in the temperature. The rituals became aggressive. The women gathered not just in ceremony, but in violence—explicit, visceral. Time’s Up shows a man with a razor at his throat, women surrounding him, their hands on him, documenting it. Not metaphorical or ambiguous. The violence is right there on the canvas.
Then Medusa. The aggression continues, but the weapon changes. A phone. Women arranged around the figure holding it, their presence itself becoming the instrument. The image becomes what dismantles. There’s a momentum building through these works, ritualistic, violent, mediated, destruction through curation. And somewhere in that accumulation, it felt like something was reaching its limit. A saturation of sorts. Like the conversation had said what it needed to say.
And then the work changed again.
Day Trip, Alison Blickle
Hilltop Meadow Experience, Alison Blickle
Blickle now imagines a world where nature has gone extinct. Beautiful, metallic-clad figures, uncanny robo-ladies and virtual reality Franken-people step into artificial digital landscapes. They’ve never encountered the natural world, and perhaps they’re even constructed in a way that prevents them from fully accessing or experiencing it, real or not.
Are the glittery tears because they are totally overcome with the everythingness of it, or do they fall because the longing for transcendence is unsatisfied, in the presence of what they’ve been seeking, yet estranged from it? Here is the possibility of a whole different kind of world, a whole different relation to it. But is that even possible for them?
Ladies Night, Alison Blickle
Night Lake, Alison Blickle
Snow Hike, Alison Blickle
If my thoughts sound scattered here, contradictory, jumping between different observations, it’s because Blickle’s work doesn’t summarize neatly for me. With some artists I can feel the vision immediately and explain it in a few sentences. But hers keeps moving. Each phase offers something different. The rituals, the violence, the estrangement. The same impulse appears throughout: transformation, reaching toward something. But the vision changes so radically that you can’t just say what it “is.”
And maybe that’s kinda the point. The whole thing, the making, the looking, the living with art. Real work moves, it lives. Being alive, it changes. Not exactly the work itself, but the fact that following an artist through real transformation means you’re always catching up. Never quite pinning it down.
To make the same work over and over, the work that was working, that work that people understood…I think perhaps that’s how your vision begins to die. Not dramatically or with great fanfare; it just gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing alive in it anymore. Blickle doesn’t allow for that to happen. She moves on. Releases what she’s done with after she’s given voice to it, wrung the truth from it, explored it to its limits.
Because the alternative is a slow suffocation, a fossilization, a turning to stone. There’s no staying still. That’s what Blickle’s work insists on. That’s what she’s made me see. Evolve or die. Make some goddamn art about it.
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When I was planning the final page layouts for The Art of Fantasy, I had a specific vision in mind. The chapter in question (and I thought the perfect one to end with) is titled How To Save The World, and I imagined it full of heroes, those paragons and protectors, carrying out their dynamic deeds and performing extraordinary feats.
Whether via the gravitas of a work of classical art, a fate fixed immovably in the sculpt of a stone, or in the contemporary mythology of the pages of a comic book, we identify with characters and archetypes that strive for greatness, we grow as they grow, and through them we see the potential for change in ourselves and the world around us. The fact that practically every culture has stories of heroes is very telling about the collective mindset of us humans as a whole – that the hope for and existence of a hero satisfies something deeply held within us.
The emergence of these champions, how they evolve and grow and inspire us along the way, the completion of their story – and the belief that it could be our story too, we could be heroes! – fulfills an emotional need that everyone of us clings to.
Under the Gaze of the Glorious, Andy Kehoe
The mainstays and conventional heroes are all there. What interested me most, though, was exploring visuals that challenged the familiar narrative of what heroism looks like.
On the second-to-last page, Tino Rodriguez answered that call with color and growth, with flowers blooming from blood, with transformation and healing made visible. His answer was jubilant.
But on the opposite page, on the final page, is Andy Kehoe.
The Art of Fantasy (interior) L: Tino Rodriguez // R: Andy Kehoe Art
Together Through The Shifting Tides, Andy Kehoe
Andy Kehoe’s forests are a different world. Darker and stranger. His creatures inhabit midnight landscapes rendered in deep blues and purples, shadows that are not empty but full of presence. And woven through that darkness: kaleidoscopic color. Feverish sunsets and neon black-light eclipses. Moss-green rocks and plum velvet hilltops and periwinkle mists.
Luminous skies of swirling celestial pageantry, heralding impending destruction, creation, revelation! The beauty is eerie, unsettling, living alongside the darkness. Those sunsets are radiant and infinite, but the forests are still haunted.
His figures are small, impossibly small, against this grandeur. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in pairs, two figures standing together in the face of something vast and unknowable, witnessing together what neither could face alone.
Under The Glow Of Anomaly, Andy Kehoe
Kehoe builds a persistent forest-world across his pieces, a mythology hushed and wild, that grows and deepens. You encounter recurring motifs and figures across canvases, as if you’ve wandered into a world with complete lives beyond the frame. It’s not illustrating a fixed story. It’s creating a space where you could emotionally live, where you recognize yourself in their smallness and solitude.
The tension between the creature’s gentle rendering and the emotional gravity of what they’re experiencing—I believe that’s where the essence of the work lives. Between sorrow and terror and wonder, occupying the same moment.
The Approach, Andy Kehoe
If you do a bit of digging on the internet, you can learn the conventional details of Kehoe’s life and studies. But I prefer his version. According to him, he was raised by iguanas on the Galapagos Islands after his merchant father was killed by pirates. He was a forest demon in Romania with a beloved beetle farm. A horse brigand in Dublin. The stories we tell about ourselves shape the worlds we inhabit. And so his paintings are real in the same way his origin story is real: emotionally true, spiritually resonant, more authentic than fact.
Lost Revery, Andy Kehoe
“Prismatic Goth,” he calls himself. When you look at his paintings, you see what he means. The midnight forests glow. Shadows are full and luminous. A cosmic sky breaks into infinite color, illuminating landscapes both devastating and wondrous.
You enter these forests seeking something you couldn’t name, but have always hoped in your heart, and you find it there: recognition that others have inhabited this same space, standing in the light and the darkness simultaneously, holding both. And this recognition matters profoundly because it assures something true about what it means to exist, to witness, to stand present to both the beautiful and the desolate without flinching.
Not conquering or overcoming or winning. Just this: I’m here. I see you. I’m standing beside you, tiny and trembling, in the face of the annihilating…and that it’s the being here that matters.
Inherent Tranquility, Andy Kehoe
This is what drew me to place his work on that final page. The creatures in his forests are heroes not because they overcome anything, but because they remain present to both the light and the darkness, to their own vulnerability and the vastness surrounding them. They see and are seen. They persist in a world that’s beautiful and indifferent. And they do it without armor, without pretense, just with the quiet awareness of their own small existence in something much larger.
Together In The Maelstrom, Andy Kehoe
What does heroism look like when you strip away spectacle? What does it mean to save a world when saving involves simply bearing witness, standing present?
I keep coming back to one of my favorite quotes in cinema: “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee. Here, at the end of all things.”
Kehoe’s paintings conjure this for me—creatures carrying the weight of loss and darkness, standing in light they didn’t create and can’t control, present to it anyway. Small, brave acts of witness that you are glad to be part of.
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