Behind the Scenes: The World of The Hollow

Art history was never just about paintings on a wall.

When I started studying it in high school and carried it through college, the pattern became impossible to ignore: to understand the art, you had to understand everything surrounding it. The artist. The time period. The culture. The politics. The religious practices that shaped how people saw the world—and how they tried to explain it through image and symbol.

What began as academic study slowly turned into something more like excavation.

Because once you peel back the surface of art history, you realize museums aren’t neutral spaces. They are collections—curated through wealth, taste, conquest, and survival. The walls of galleries often reflect what someone powerful once decided was worth preserving. Even the grand murals and religious works we admire today were frequently commissions—created within systems of influence, devotion, or control.

And yet, despite all of that, something else persists underneath.

A record of human imagination.

From cave paintings layered onto stone walls to the precision of Michelangelo’s marble, art has always been more than decoration. It is memory. It is belief made visible. It is the moment a person tries to translate something internal—fear, devotion, wonder, grief—into something that can exist outside of them.

That’s the part that stayed with me.

Not just the aesthetics, but the mythology behind them.

Dragon Tamer, by Jen Sequel, Oil on cavas, 30x40in

Over time, I became increasingly fascinated with ancient civilizations—their gods, their goddesses, their monsters, and the way those stories weren’t just stories. They were frameworks for understanding existence. These figures weren’t distant concepts. They were imagined as walking among people, shaping weather, fate, love, war, and death.

And somewhere along the way, I realized how much of that knowledge was quietly fading.

Not erased in one dramatic moment, but slowly slipping out of everyday awareness. A mythology here, a pantheon there, reduced to fragments in textbooks or simplified references in modern media.

I wanted to change that—not by preserving it as something distant and academic, but by letting it breathe again in contemporary work.

That shift really clarified itself during a commission I received from a dear friend: a request for Charybdis. Not the abstract mythological concept, but something interpreted through my visual language—women, intricate headdresses, layered symbolism, presence.

Something clicked.

It wasn’t just about illustrating mythology. It was about translating it.

From there, it became easier to see how this thread had already been running through my work.

In my Incredibly Strange & Completely Random Holidays series, I originally began with a reference book that turned out to be riddled with inconsistencies and errors. That discovery pushed me into deeper research—not just accepting what was easy to find, but questioning it, correcting it where I could, and tracing origins more carefully. And while there’s always more misinformation than anyone can reasonably untangle, the process itself became part of the work.

That series evolved into something more playful than planned: a way to explore the absurd, forgotten, and oddly specific celebrations that sit scattered across our calendars.

But underneath the humor is the same impulse.

Context matters.

Stories matter.

And where they come from matters even more.

That same thread runs through everything else I create.

The gods and goddesses, the creatures, the mythic echoes—they appear again and again across my work. They live in Pandora’s Legacy. They surface in the Slaughterhouse series. They move through Eleanor’s Garden. They shapeThe Hunt series. And they continue to weave into the novel I’m currently writing.

Each project is a different doorway into the same world.

At a glance, the mix of topics across my blog might feel eclectic—art history, mythology, horror, strange holidays, folklore fragments, contemporary storytelling. But it isn’t randomness for its own sake.

It’s layered exploration.

It’s the collision of research, imagination, and the persistent belief that old stories don’t disappear—they change form.

This is the world of The Hollow.

A place where mythology doesn’t sit behind glass. Where history isn’t frozen. Where art, in all its strange and shifting forms, is still alive enough to evolve.

And you’re welcome to step inside.