Inspiration comes from many places, dreams, memory, mythology, music, old stories, forgotten places, strained emotions, and the quiet tension between beauty and unease. I am drawn to the surreal, the melancholic, and the uncanny: crumbling architecture, skeletal forms, gloomy skies, symbolism, liminal spaces, and the emotional weight carried by shadow and silence.
This page offers a glimpse into the influences that shape my creative world. From dark fantasy, surrealism, literature, film, and philosophy to fragments of everyday life, these inspirations feed the visual landscapes, stories, poems, and soundscapes I create. Rather than direct references, they are echoes, pieces of atmosphere, feeling, and thought that drift through my work and help form the imaginary spaces I like to explore.
- All that glitters is not gold – J.R.R. Tolkien
- Alone – Edgar Allan Poe
- Because I Could Not Stop For Death – Emily Dickinson
- Boat Ride, The – Roald Dahl
- Dark Deep Darkness – David Lynch
- Dark House – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Despair – By H.P. Lovecraft
- I am! – By John Clare
- I am not I – By Juan RamĂ³n JimĂ©nez
- In the Garden of Badthings – By Doug Macleod
- Ode to a Nightingale – John Keats
- Rainy day – H.W. Longfellow
- Still the Rain Falls – Dame Edith Sitwell
Dan Verkys 