Hexes: The Story Behind My Kawaii Goth Witch Painting

Most Halloween art gives you one thing to look at. A witch, a pumpkin, a moon, done. Hexes hands you a whole room instead and lets you find your own way around it.

The witch is a cat

There is no woman in a pointed hat anywhere in this picture. The hat sits on a black cat, who stands upright at the cauldron with a wand in one paw and the expression of somebody who has done this before. The brew is green and clearly working.

The second cat, a ginger one, is asleep on the daybed by the window and is missing all of it. That might be my favorite detail in the whole painting. In every room where something exciting is happening, there is one cat fully committed to sleeping through it.

What is in the room if you keep looking

The shelves are full of potion bottles. A skull sits on top of them next to a carved pumpkin, a bat hangs above, and a small chalkboard announces the witching hour. On the floor there is a stack of books and you can read the spines: Ghost Stories, Herbs & Curses, and Hexes, with a little ghost peering over the top of them.

There is an owl on the table next to a crystal ball and an open spellbook. A broom leans in the corner. One drawer is labeled Spells & Potions, a note on the wall says Stay Weird, mice run along the floor, toadstools grow out of the boards, and a tree has decided to come up straight through the middle of the room with ivy trailing off the beams. Through the window there is a moon and a very dark sky. Bees, because there are always bees.

None of that is filler. It is the part that makes a painting worth hanging where you walk past it every day, because you keep finding one more thing in it.

Why I keep painting rooms instead of characters

A single character is finished the moment you have seen it. A room is not. You look at the cat first, then the cauldron, then you notice the titles on the books, and three weeks later you spot the ghost. I did the same thing with The Candy Decay Apartment, and it is still the kind of picture I enjoy painting most: an interior you are allowed to be nosy in.

Witchy, but pink

The walls are striped pink. The rug is purple with gold stars. Nothing in here is black and orange, and that is deliberate. Cute creepy works best when the colors are inviting and the content is quietly off, which is the mechanism I went through in What Is Cute Creepy Art? and, for the room around the art, in What Is Pastel Goth?

It also means Hexes does not have to come down in November. A witch's workshop is not a seasonal decoration, it is just a nice place to imagine living. If you want a whole corner in that mood, there are ideas in how to decorate for Halloween without a single plastic skeleton.

Where to get it

Hexes is 21 × 21 cm / 8.27 × 8.27 in as a hand-signed print, printed in my own studio, signed by hand and finished with my embossed artist stamp, for 35 euro. There is a bigger wall art version if you want it to take over a wall, and a digital download for 9,90 euro if you want it on your wall tonight.

If you find something in that room that I did not mention here, tell me. People regularly point out things in my paintings that I put there without noticing.