Shipwrecked
Greetings all my fellow Curiosity Explorers and Magic-Makers! Allow me to introduce myself: I am the Wondersmith. I work with wonder in the same way a goldsmith works with gold to create beautiful, meaningful, and...
Strange Dialogue: Picture and Prose
Springtime (when fancies turn to thoughts of love) is high time to swap that dog-eared, fly-specked, bookworm-infested copy of The Hobbit you’ve been carting around since the fourth grade for something befitting the sophisticate...
The Bee Goddesses of Stephanie Law
They are ethereal. Supple and airy, with an almost Erté-like fluidity and grace. But the goddesses that Stephanie Law paints also have an earthy majesty the father of Art Deco never bestowed upon his creations....
Alan Lee: Artist Of Middle-Earth
If I were to say to you, “A woman robed in white, standing next to a bowl, holding a silver ewer,” you would likely know exactly which scene I am referring to. It is...
The Work of His Hands: Giles Newman’s Carvings
A hobbit’s favorite tool is his own hands, whether working in his garden or knitting a sweater, carving an intricate design in the curved lintel of his hobbit hole, or chopping vegetables to go in...
Floral Fox Art – The Botanical Paintings of Amy Rose
Lilacs were not supposed to bloom in July, that was a simple botanical fact, at least it had been until now. Girls in the neighborhood had begun to whisper that if you kissed the...
Bringing Legends to Life – Baltimore Knife and Sword
by Carolyn Turgeon and photography by Steve Parke
As you wind through Patapsco State Park, just north of Baltimore, passing a flagstone-encrusted quarry and crossing a defunct train track that parallels a charming stream, you come...
The Art of Darla Teagarden
Austin artist Darla Teagarden brings magic realism literally to light in the medium of photography, leaving the viewer intrigued, wonderfully tantalized—one might even say spellbound—by her darkly cinematic and playfully animistic imagery. Inspired, in her...
Fairies in Advertising
Fairies are notorious for tricking folks into making bad decisions. (See Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: transformations, potions, falling in love with jackasses.) So it’s natural that hucksters, peddling their own magic and illusions, would people...
Visions of Enchantment
A dragon-like sea monster rears above a ship, terrifying in its unleashed rage, yet beautiful—delicate scales, a sinuous grace to its form.
A maiden cautiously steps into a fairy ring, her garments diaphanous, her expression concerned....