Imagined Memories

A work in progress. The idea for this series comes from this - In 1953, two surrealists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning took a ten day rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I'm fascinated by the idea that two visionary artists went down that ancient and solitary river and landscape. I like to imagine how they may have seen things ...things ordinary people see on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon...and how they processed those things in a very different way. "Seen through the naked eye This hill is twice as young as its age For your beautiful naked eyes She clothes herself with plumes and lead And a secret, transient sky But Viewed through temperament She takes fire She encrimsons Roars Trombones and booms In the silences of space Like a pyramid enraged Which laughs twice a century Laughs With a hazy smile Laughs Without rival or reasonThen it's terrible love chant Explodes between two beds of glass. " - Hill by Max Ernst Tanning likening her memories to sparks of phosphorus: “those faraway beings are fireflies, you might say, each one a bit of phosphorus, a life that brushed mine and caused me, in its glow, to exist...” That phrase which I like very much is a key ingredient in the series which is not meant to be an illustration of those two surrealists journey down a river. That story/event is something to hang the idea of the series on which deals with how the same things ( and at times the most ordinary and mundane things ) can be seen ( and experienced ) by individuals but the mind will process them in vastly different ways.