Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. (Photo by Mike Stilkey)

Karis, an 8 week old lion cub, growls at a pumpkin as she explores a Halloween treat put in her enclosure by staff at Blair Drummond Safari Park near Stirling, Scotland, Tuesday, October 29, 2013. (Photo by Andrew Milligan/AP Photo/PA Wire)

A partial solar eclipse is seen as a labourer works at a construction site in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 9, 2016. (Photo by Samrang Pring/Reuters)

People dressed in costumes have a break while marching during the Vijanera Festival, in the small village of Silio, northern Spain, Sunday, January 3, 2016. The Vijanera masquerade, of pre-Roman origin, is the first carnival of the year in Europe symbolizing the triumph of good over evil and involving the participation of crowds of residents wearing different masks, animal skins and brightly coloured clothing with its own complex function and symbolism and becoming the living example of the survival of archaic cults to nature. (Photo by Francisco Seco/AP Photo)

A labourer carries a basket of bananas inside a wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Bengaluru, India, August 22, 2016. (Photo by Abhishek N. Chinnappa/Reuters)

Yanna Xian, 24, and her boyfriend Mitch Brown, 27, were swimming while on a boat tour off Honolulu, Hawaii last year, when a curious two-week-old humpback approached them. (Photo by South West News Service)

Chisanga Mwila dressed as Ariel from The Little Mermaid on Cullercoats beach, Newcastle on Tuesday, May 9, 2023 ahead of the 2023 live-action remake of the film as part of an awareness campaign from sustainable toilet paper company Oceans highlighting the negative impact of marine pollution on the British coastline. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire)

A woman swings on a swing in Venao beach in Pedasi, Panama, Saturday, July 13, 2024. (Photo by Matias Delacroix/AP Photo)