Two weeks until my new book is out, so I reckon itโs time for another โmeet the authorโ post!
Iโm S. Elizabeth, and I write books about the stranger, dreaming underside of art. The Art of the Unknown is my fourth offering in The Art In The Margins series.
Itโs a treasury of the esoteric, the uncanny, and the unexplained. Nearly two hundred works gathered across centuries and continents, from the vertiginous angst of Lรฉon Spilliaert to the surrealist gloom of Odilon Redon, from the burning prophecies of William Blake to the medieval radiance of Hildegard von Bingen, from Leonor Finiโs regal sorceresses to Ithell Colquhounโs occult alchemy, from the witching dark of Francisco Goya to the dusk-blue fairylands of Edward Robert Hughes.
The book moves in four parts, drifting from the vast forces out beyond us toward the stranger mystery folded inside us. Cosmic mysteries and hidden watchers, liminal spaces and parallel worlds, restless spirits and forgotten knowledge, and the strange current of the body itself.
Underneath all of it is one small hunch of mine. That every good mystery begins the second someone is brave enough to say โI donโt know.โ We tend to treat those words like a wall. I think theyโre a door left ajar, with all the strange and marvelous things pooling in the light on the other side.
Thereโs also a small ritual I fold into every book. Somewhere in these pages is an image that drifted the internet for years labeled โartist unknown,โ now printed with its makerโs name given back, so it can never be lost again.
So I hope youโll spend some time wandering these strange pages, and get a little lost for a while yourself.
