ARTIST STATEMENT
MY HEART
I care a lot about freedom of expression in art, especially indie art. From your fluffiest narrative, to your darkest fantasy, and every shade of gray in between - it has a place to exist, and no one has the right to snuff out what brings you joy.
All fiction is lovely fiction to someone; no matter how repugnant you may find it.
My name is Namiin Stone, and I live in fantasy worlds full of strife and grief - but they are worlds overfull with love and longing, too. A tender ache in the space where darkness and desire coalesce into the surreal and taboo.
I am an adult artist and author with a singular story that I want to tell, time and again: a father and his daughter caught in a romance fraught with tension, with desire, with an inescapable - and sometimes supernatural - need to be together. Proclaiming mutual, irrevocable, burning love that extends far beyond the bounds of family.
I choose to be so brutally honest about what heals me, to be so terribly vulnerable about what brings me joy, and to be so viscerally open about what breeds base carnality in me. You choose whether or not you want to see what I have on offer. That choice is not my responsibility.
The themes I write about are intentionally divorced from reality. The stories and artwork herein are fictional; all about people that are fake; any and all similarities to any real person - living or dead - are a coincidence.
MY STORIES
Each of these stories is an alternate universe centering around two main characters: Ila and her father Idris. Ila is mine, Idris belongs to my husband Diallo. These specific characters are always father/daughter even when it may not seem so, and they will always have a happy ending, even when that might seem an impossibility.
The stories listed below are currently being written and are not yet available in their fully finished forms. Each story will at the very least be a novella in length, contain illustrated front and back covers, and a various number of accompanyment illustrations both erotic and not.
THE SUMMONING
A girl discovers a book and becomes haunted by more than memory in her late grandfather's attic. The moment she touches it, the moment it burns her - it marks her.
She summons a man who is half-real. She summons a monster whose claws hooked into her heart before she took her first breath. She summons a shadow that makes her so desperate, so full of a horrible, aching grief and longing that it unravels her from her very bones. Whatever he is - man, monster, shadow - she understands innately that she belongs to him.
Ila thought she'd been abandoned in childhood - then she discovers through the loss of her last living relative that she was not abandoned at all. Ila thought she'd been untouchable when her first kiss and every encounter thereafter ended in catastrophe - then she discovers through surreal, sexual nightmares that she was always meant to be touched.
Idris - the man, the monster, the shadow - cannot take her where she belongs. Not yet. He can only guide her to find pieces of the puzzle that lead to him in the wake of a sickness that begins the moment he touches her. He is ancient, but not all knowing - he never knew that a fleeting touch would cascade and spell out Ila's doom. A demon is hollow without his flesh, but a demon's daughter will die without her mate.
BLACK STAG - WHITE DOE
An Arabic, symphonic metal band called Elk Garden vanished without a trace over twenty years ago.
Ila comes home from her third year in an out-of-state college after a car accident that nearly ended her life. Idris, ever her doting father, welcomes her home and encourages her to enroll in a local college. Both to continue her studies and so he can keep a watchful eye on her, since she did not walk away from the accident entirely unscathed.
Idris begins to get peculiar phone calls that have him working long evening hours at his accounting firm, despite being just weeks away from a late retirement at seventy-one. At the same time, Elk Garden makes a sudden, explosive comeback with its seven-foot-five, masked, anonymous southpaw violinist and front man, The Black Stag. As Ila grows closer with a musician named Ahmed over the band's encore twenty-five years in the making, tensions with her father rise at home over what kind of designs he has on her.
Idris can see right through his punk bullshit; Ila is too clouded by affection and a desire to live and thrive in the wake of her car accident to do the same. At their apex, a strange turn of events leads Ila to the backstage of an Elk Garden show. Right into the arms and heart of the mysterious, mythical, eerily familiar Black Stag...
CONTACT AND MISCELLANEOUS
If you'd like to contact me for any reason, be it to pick my brain and ask questions, discuss my work and themes, or inquire about commissions or hiring me for commercial illustration work, please send an email to [email protected].
If you are e-mailing me with the intent to hire me either for commercial illustration work or personal commissions, please read through my Commission Page and my Terms of Service.
If you enjoy what I do, and you'd like to support my work - illustrations, short stories, and novels alike - consider subscribing to me on SubscribeStar! Can't use SubscribeStar, but you'd still like to support me? I've got an alternative Subscription page.
If subscriptions aren't your speed, but you like my work and you'd still like to support me and get some cool stuff, you can buy digital artpacks and stories on my gumroad page! And, if you'd like to just toss me a buck or two, I'm always up for a coffee or three.