FANTAST IN FOCUS: OSKA Oska is an illustrator and graphic designer from Montreal, Canada. His futuristic artworks, which feature both atmospheric megastructures and contemplative portrait-like miniatures, are frequently shared on Tumblr and Reddit and have been featured in a number of different places, such as Booooooom and My Modern Met. After seeing his pensive piece “Illusion”, we…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: IVAN CENZI Ivan Cenzi is a kindred spirit. As the curator of the virtual wunderkammer Bizzarro Bazar, he trawls the depths of the human and animal kingdoms to unearth strange, bizarre, and often macabre stories. When he isn’t clambering through ancient catacombs or writing about “invisible” castles, he shares spooky videos like this. One could…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: PAUL LEWIN Storytelling is Paul Lewin’s passion. His sources of inspiration are thousand-year-old tales—all of which are linked to the oral traditions and folkways of West Africa. But the vision that Paul depicts in his acrylic artworks is a surreal inter-dimensional realm of past, present, and future, a world which beams up…
ODD TRUTHS: TWO MYSTICS OF AMERICAN JAZZ In its early stages, jazz was publicly scapegoated as The Devil’s music. Much like the moral watchdogs who would later comment on the Satanic nature of soul and rock and roll, anti-jazz writers were concerned about the perceived social degrading of Western culture and channelled their prejudices into hateful polemics. This…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: CHRISTY LEE ROGERS Millions of years ago, creatures rose from the depths of ancient seas and transformed into divergent populations over vast stretches of time. In a way, we still repeat this primeval origin story. After nine months submerged in a shadowy womb, we emerge from an embryonic ‘ocean’ and ascend into a new…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: JAKE BADDELEY Jake Baddeley’s art is visual alchemy, an exercise in the sublimation of wide-ranging cultural influences. Like an alchemist who synthesises base metals to create the philosopher’s stone, Jake draws on the primeval symbols of Greco-Roman mythology and his own subconscious to produce paintings that seem to shimmer with an ethereal…
ODD TRUTHS: THE LANGUAGE OF THE CROWS For some thinkers in the Middle Ages, fluency in the “language of the birds” was a mystical and rare skill reserved for magicians and saints. As such, it was on a par with the mysterious language of angels, a divine speech that, when spoken, described the natural world with an…
ODD TRUTHS: THE OCCULT SECRETS OF PERCY SHELLEY In 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in London. Shelley began writing the novel as an experimental short ghost story during Europe’s “Year Without a Summer” in 1816. It went on to become one of the most famous works of Gothic romance…
ODD TRUTHS: SILK FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA The ocean, as William Shakespeare describes it in Henry V, is full of “sunken wrack and sumless treasuries”. Some of these riches have yet to be discovered, while others have been harvested and cherished for generations. In this regard, sea-silk is truly a gift of the…
ODD TRUTHS: CAN THE STARS AFFECT HUMAN BEHAVIOUR? One of mankind’s oldest and most enduring ideas is the belief that planets and stars determine the destinies of individuals and societies. Ascertaining these secret causes was “the goal of the wise”, which is why the world’s earliest star-gazers were often mathematicians and philosophers. They mapped the courses…