The Dream of Ragnarok

This week, we shared our Great Big Fitness Birthday Shoot with actor Matt Keeley in August 2026.

The final part of that session yielded a Distant Era fantastical portrait as something extra—a birthday gift for Matt. This brief post shares a few details about that process.

Leaning into Abstraction

When I started editing the Viking look from Matt Keeley’s session, I turned in a few fast, fun edits before focusing on the teachings of my compositing mentor Chris Koeppen. At the beginning of the summer, I had created an Anne Bonny and Mary Read image for Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s production of yo ho. in this style, composited from paintings. With Matt’s Viking image, I leaned into abstraction as Chris had encouraged, not taking things as literally as I have in my previous compositing work, applying textures for fun and on gut impulse rather than planning them. For instance, a close look at the piece reveals strange (by my interpretation, “apocalyptic”) details that occur as the result of seeing one painting stacked upon and blended with another, forming new shapes and patterns that are open to interpretation. Thinking I’d finished, I named the piece “The Dream of Ragnarok.”

Then I recalled a seventeenth-century Flemish School painting of Saint George and the Dragon I was familiar with. As an experiment, I cut the dragon from that painting and layered it into Matt’s image, paying attention mostly to the coils. Thus, I had something to represent the Midgard Serpent in this Ragnarok dream.

Matt Keeley, *The Dream of Ragnarok*. Makeup by Khaki Pixley. Photography and compositing by Steven Townshend | Distant Era.

I consider “The Dream of Ragnarok” the second image I’ve made in this style, building on what I’d learned from the Anne Bonny and Mary Read image and preparing me for what I’d soon do with Idle Muse Theatre Company’s character portraits for Witch. Many thanks to Matt Keeley and Khaki Pixley for their collaboration in creating this artwork.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.