I may come back to this comment section when a future chapter of my serialised novella comes out on here. The imagery and concept of it all came from a dream, or two, actually. I love including all little details from my dreams or dream-like images. I remember a surrealism exhibition in Venice last year that was particularly inspiring, as was the Bosch I saw in Brugge this year.
Ooooo... I love knowing about her and her friendship with Leonora. I am at work on a double memoir about my husband and I. He died in 2020. After his death I started the practice of Lucid dreaming and studying Tibetan Buddhism. I published post #1 of my Ghost Chapters From The Green Books on here yesterday. I will be dealing with my adventures in dreaming, meditation and being a ghost after my husband's death. https://karawesterman.substack.com/p/ghost-chapters-from-the-green-books
oh dear... we are on parallel or perhaps identical tracks but you feel a very very long way ahead. but i think i will go crazy if i try to follow you... this is so intimate. I’m going to be working with alchemy via Hillman i think, but my intent feels pretty identical in the moment here. I think it’s meaningful that this is a common pursuit. and Ted Gioia’s excitement about romanticism fits here too - I feel like telling him that it’s been a continuous undercurrent since Blake etc. ... never came close to dying out. but i’m kind of stunned that what you say here is a perfect fit for my last seminar. i love this.
Tom! I feel sure you are the one who is ahead! It’s just that my impulse leans towards practices, perhaps. Happy to be exploring some of the same territories.
This is such a dreamy, inspiring piece and there are some great links to some of the material in that sadly out-of-print collection of Remedios Varo's writings. I see that the biography of Varo by Janet Kaplan is also close to impossible to get (over £200 on Amazon). It's time these women were better known, as I'm sure you'll agree, and this post can only help.
I love your account of staring at a wall and 'seeing things'! This, of course, is Da Vinci's recommendation in his Treatise on Painting and was taken up by the surrealists, especially Dali, who based his paranoic-critical method on it. I found a long and interesting article on Dali and seeing which might be of interest https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00496/full
As you can tell from my Fur Cup pieces here on Substack, I find that surrealist pictures almost can't help turning into moving, happening, dreams in front of my eyes and it'll be fun to use your specific instructions for my next journey into a surrealist world.
Varo's work is immediately enchanting and I love it with a passion! Thank you for all the extracts, too. What a treat!
I may come back to this comment section when a future chapter of my serialised novella comes out on here. The imagery and concept of it all came from a dream, or two, actually. I love including all little details from my dreams or dream-like images. I remember a surrealism exhibition in Venice last year that was particularly inspiring, as was the Bosch I saw in Brugge this year.
Please do! I’d love to read!
I'm back and with a link to the chapter in question: https://harveyhamer.substack.com/p/children-of-shadows-38e
I wonder whether you can guess which parts were directly from a dream and which were altered...
Ooooo... I love knowing about her and her friendship with Leonora. I am at work on a double memoir about my husband and I. He died in 2020. After his death I started the practice of Lucid dreaming and studying Tibetan Buddhism. I published post #1 of my Ghost Chapters From The Green Books on here yesterday. I will be dealing with my adventures in dreaming, meditation and being a ghost after my husband's death. https://karawesterman.substack.com/p/ghost-chapters-from-the-green-books
Thank you, Kara. And thank you for sharing your post.
oh dear... we are on parallel or perhaps identical tracks but you feel a very very long way ahead. but i think i will go crazy if i try to follow you... this is so intimate. I’m going to be working with alchemy via Hillman i think, but my intent feels pretty identical in the moment here. I think it’s meaningful that this is a common pursuit. and Ted Gioia’s excitement about romanticism fits here too - I feel like telling him that it’s been a continuous undercurrent since Blake etc. ... never came close to dying out. but i’m kind of stunned that what you say here is a perfect fit for my last seminar. i love this.
Tom! I feel sure you are the one who is ahead! It’s just that my impulse leans towards practices, perhaps. Happy to be exploring some of the same territories.
ahead in the sense of practice - which takes priority I am pretty sure. I love your stuff.
I haven’t come across Varo’s work before and it’s really interesting! I love the richness of the imagery and imagination in her paintings.
She was a great explorer of mysticism and would completely envision her paintings before picking up a brush.
This is such a dreamy, inspiring piece and there are some great links to some of the material in that sadly out-of-print collection of Remedios Varo's writings. I see that the biography of Varo by Janet Kaplan is also close to impossible to get (over £200 on Amazon). It's time these women were better known, as I'm sure you'll agree, and this post can only help.
I love your account of staring at a wall and 'seeing things'! This, of course, is Da Vinci's recommendation in his Treatise on Painting and was taken up by the surrealists, especially Dali, who based his paranoic-critical method on it. I found a long and interesting article on Dali and seeing which might be of interest https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00496/full
As you can tell from my Fur Cup pieces here on Substack, I find that surrealist pictures almost can't help turning into moving, happening, dreams in front of my eyes and it'll be fun to use your specific instructions for my next journey into a surrealist world.
Varo's work is immediately enchanting and I love it with a passion! Thank you for all the extracts, too. What a treat!