Pakistani Christian Maria Akbar, 15, checks herself in the mirror, after having her make up done by hairdresser Razia Rehmat, 39, in preparation for Christmas holiday, at a hair salon, in a slum that hosts Christian families, on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, December 24, 2014. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)

Hungarian pilot and European champion Zoltan Veres flies under the oldest Hungarian bridge, the “Lanchid” (Chain Bridge) with his “MXS” type plane on May 1, 2014 during a Red Bull flying and car show around the Danube River of Budapest downtown. (Photo by Attila Kisbenedek/AFP Photo)

A museum employee views “Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482)” by Andy Warhol at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, Britain, March 2, 2016. The piece forms part of “Botticelli Reimagined”, an exhibition exploring the ways artists have responded to the artistic legacy of the fifteenth century artist Sandro Botticelli, and including over fifty artworks by Botticelli himself. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

A Catholic priest blesses a grave, marking All Saints' Day as the people stand next to monument partially destroyed by an old fallen tree at a cemetery in the village of Zubkovo, 150 km (93 miles) west of Minsk, Belarus, Wednesday, November 1, 2017. Belarusian Catholics marked All Saints Day by visiting graves of their relatives. (Photo by Sergei Grits/AP Photo)

A worker unloads fish from a taxi boot at a fish market in Kolkata, India on February 5, 2018. (Photo by Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters)

A Sudanese girl with half painted face watches as protesters demonstrate outside the defense ministry compound in Khartoum, Sudan, April 25, 2019. (Photo by Umit Bektas/Reuters)

A security man keeps guard during Malawi's President elect Arthur Peter Mutharika swearing in ceremony at Kamuzu Stadium in Blantyre on May 28, 2019, after a contentious election marred by allegations of fraud and vote-rigging. The Malawi Electoral Commission announced on Monday that Mutharika, who heads the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), had narrowly won last week's vote after an injunction barring the release of the results was lifted. (Photo by Amos Gumulira/AFP Photo)

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)