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)

A woman wearing a mask reacts at her garden which locates next to chimneys of coal-fired power plant in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, China, January 28, 2015. Beijing introduced tougher regulations this year to combat pollution, keen to overhaul China's unwanted image of smog-choked cities, fouled waterways and heavy-metal tainted soil. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

Snow surrounds one of the Anthony Gormley statues called Another Place at Crosby Beach Merseyside, United Kingdom on Friday, March 10, 2023. (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

Visitors stand next to the artwork “No, 2021” by Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan displayed at the gallery Gagosian during the Art Basel fair for Modern and contemporary art, in Basel, on June 17, 2025. The fair will open to the public from June 19 to June 22, 2025, featuring over 290 leading galleries and more than 4,000 artists from five continents. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP Photo)

Jack, a Lurcher from Dogs Trust Salisbury, walks past a window display of models in a Dogs Trust shop window in Salisbury, as part of a campaign to discourage the impulse buying of dogs ahead of Valentine's Day, on February 10, 2014. (Photo by Matt Alexander/PA Wire)

A participant races in the Brompton World Championship in Bern, Switzerland October 21, 2018. (Photo by Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

Walking figures depicting late US rock and roll legend Elvis Presley appear on a traffic light switching from green to red in Friedberg near Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, December 6, 2018. Presley served in Friedberg from October 1958 to March 1960 as a soldier in the US Armed Forces. (Photo by Michael Probst/AP Photo)

A man wearing a traditional Russian costume holds a goose after a traditional goose fight during celebrations of Maslenitsa, also known as Pancake Week, which is a pagan holiday marking the end of winter, in Suzdal, Russia on February 29, 2020. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)