So, originally, this post was about Arik Moonhawk Roper’s amazing Vision of the Hawk retrospective art book. The words were written! But then, I was prepping the posts for November of last year and realized, crap, I already wrote a post about that. Such are the hazards of working a year or so in advance, I guess.

Anyway, the second Visions of the Hawk piece was pegged to my first exposure to Roper’s art, which was not his cover to Sleep’s Dopesmoker, but rather, this book, Mushroom Magick (2009), found in a box of review copies at the New York Daily News left up for grabs circa 2010. While I did not get to keep the book (another photo editor had dibs), I got to flip through it that evening, and I was impressed. But shit was going down in real life in 2010, so I entirely forgot about it until I saw the extracts from it in Vision of the Hawk. Me being me, I tried to find a copy, but it took a while, because it’s sort of expensive and scarce. But now I have one, and am showing it to you!

This is a 144-page collection of paintings of mushrooms. And, well, not just any mushrooms, obviously. There are some field notes on the specific types, generally with an eye towards the level of psylocybin they contain, but for the most part, just paintings of mushrooms. Imagine if Fungi of the Far Realms was entirely dedicated to naturally-occurring mushrooms and contained no game mechanics. That’s this. It’s a really lovely book and I think it is testament to Roper’s powers as an illustrator that it never gets boring. He achieves this, I think, by tweaking elements of his style as he goes. Here, a bit of text, next some bold line work, here water color, here a curious crop, and so on. Theme and variation, to an almost mesmerizing degree.