We were thrilled to have Ryan Davis share his image “The Fair Band” for our first back cover.

The illustrator and designer’s work draws on history, fairy tales, and the surreal, using those genre’s logic and archetypes to create playful narratives. Common themes include “intimacy, objecthood, space and the self,” he says.

“Genre and image help me explore and communicate with the sensuous aspects of the world. These sensuous aspects — the emotions we hold, the spirit invested in objects, the most ambiguous parts of the self — they are the immediately felt. They are a call and response between us and the world; they are that which invest our days with a breathing magic; they are that which makes life a waking dream.

“It is through genres, through fairy tales, history, the surreal, that I find myself best able to speak in the language of the sensuous. It’s my hope that my illustrations speak the language of our inner magic. For, like Alice who fell down, down, down into Wonderland, an image can become a looking glass, lowering us into our fantastical interior worlds.”

You can learn more about Davis’ work – and maybe even buy some – at his website: Ryan Davis Makes Art.