Listen to the song that partly inspired this artwork!

Hello! Yes, I’m still on a break from NG for the most part. I occasionally come here to post or do cleanup stuff, I just have not been answering my notifications and they’ve stacked up to 435 as of now. Good god. I’ll be fully back at the end of the month.

Anyway, I really wanted to bang out a quick artwork tonight, I really wanted to draw The Unknown from that bogus Willy Wonka attraction, and I really wanted to experiment with negative space and drawing with white on a black canvas. So I did all three.

As Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is basically a moral play like the rest of Dahl’s books, I wanted to say something about what The Unknown could represent as a character if he existed in that narrative. My idea is that The Unknown is a universal boogeyman, an allegory for the idea of some “dangerous other” that is propagated by shallow individuals like the other Golden Ticket holders and their parents. The mirror is a symbol for self-examination; The Unknown comes out from behind it because the most uncomfortable thing for a shallow person to do is truly examine themselves and the idea that they might be wrong. Here Charlie Bucket himself is presented with a mirror by The Unknown, a final test of his resilience, and briefly recoils in pain.

I heard in an article that the actor for this character got a horror movie deal out of it, so if there was a “where are they now” update like this, someone clearly knows who is behind the mask. If you can send this fanart their way and see what they think, I’d be more than happy.

(Update: After seeing an interview, I found out that the Unknown actor is a woman. This is something not a lot of people know, but I’ve been cross-dressing as male characters for several Halloweens, so seeing something like this makes me feel like I’m not weird. I’m very happy about it.)

Take care, everyone.

-Cass (Thetageist)