Last night, I had a dream that Ted took a hiatus from Trading Post to go back to photography. In my dream, I found an attic (basement? vault?) full of old, never-before-seen fairy tale and Lovecraftian paintings and illustrations, I showed them to Teddy, and he spent months translating the art we dug up into a massive fashion editorial. Ted was using a daguerreotype, a 19th century box camera, and my dad’s 35mm Nikon, and his studio was our living room, but wasn’t. Ted’s photos looked like a hybrid of Ted’s style of photography and Eugenio Recuenco’s. He eventually turned the project into a sort of phantasmagoria, complete with spectres and Pepper’s ghosts.

What did you dream about last night?

[ mirror ]

PHANTASMAGORIA
This oil invites dark muses. It is an oil of somber reveries and unearthed horrors, and is inspirational in all creative undertakings with a macabre bent. This oil is for horror writers, artists, and musicians, and for those who wish to better understand their shadow selves.

This oil contains tobacco absolute, pomegranate extract, orris CO2 extract, steam-distilled fractionated white camphor, wildcrafted myrrh oil, jasmine sambac, steam-distilled galbanum essential oil, elecampane essential oil, motia attar, champaca attar, mugwort essential oil, organic clary sage essential oil, styrax, labdanum absolute, Somalian opoponax, carrot seed oil, wildcrafted cypress essential oil, rose otto, asafetida essential oil, and crushed poppy petal infusion created from flowers grown in the TAL garden.

Phantasmagoria was created on Imbolc 2011, and was charged on every dark moon from February 2011 til September 2011. It was created under the auspices of Luna, Mercury, and Pluto, and has never seen daylight.