''By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright''- Edgar Allan Poe

Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths."- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
( illustration by Alfred Kubin )

“The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?” - Emile M. Cioran
 ( painting by Salamith Wulfing, ''Transfiguration'' )

  ( from 'Wyllt' )

"the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil." - Shakespeare
(Painting by Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth with the Daggers)

'' The final mystery is oneself '' -Oscar Wilde

"The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."

—Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

(Painting by Peter Paul Rubens)

''So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then Darkness again and silence'' -Henry wadsworth Longfellow

   ( illustration by Max Hunziker )

''It was the straying that found the path direct.”- Austin Osman Spare

( painting: ''Astral Body & Ghost''- Austin Osman Spare )

''Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream''.
~Ryokan

 (painting- ''Ascent of the blessed'' by Hieronymus Bosch)

‎"All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to the ocean and drown. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river."
-Simone Schwarz-Bart 

(Painting: The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich)

''Man is a genius when he is dreaming''- Akira Kurosawa
( illustration by Max Ernst )

''Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too''.  -Horace
  ( illustration by William Blake )

''Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing''.
-Omar Khayyam

(photo by Adelaide Hanscom )

  Paintings by Franz Von Stuck

''I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.'' -Charles Baudelaire
  ( illustration by Alfred Kubin )

Spring 2011 Tour

                                             ( poster by Sera Timms )

Belogradchik Rocks (Bulgaria), also known as ''The Horseman'' & ''The Bear'' are rock formations that date back from 10,000BC -600BC. Legend has it that monks expelled a beautiful nun from nunnery for falling in love with a man on white horse. The monks, nun, man on horse are turned to stone forming the Rocks.

Black Math Horseman illustration by- Sue Bielenberg

'' Moires ''- by Eric Rondepierre

 William Mortensen (1897-1965) compositions were steeped in Gothic and Romantic traditions, his subject matter often whimsical, often bizarre, his style a strange combination of Lorenzo de Bernini, Edgar Allan Poe, Man Ray, Salvador Dali and Maxfield Parrish.

''And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams, Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams -- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams''. -Edgar Allan Poe

 ( illustration by Konstantin Kalinovich )

Wood Cut by Albrecht Durer