A time gone by. A time yet to happen. Child's play not forgotten.
Off to worlds unknown.
Remember the first time you sat in one of those vintage amusement ride jets — red and chrome, a number painted on the side, the promise of lift-off in every detail? For a few magical minutes you were not sitting at a fairground or outside a grocery store. You were flying. Somewhere beyond the ordinary, something extraordinary was waiting, and you believed it completely.
Come Fly With Me begins there — in that specific childhood certainty — and takes it somewhere wilder. The vintage red and white jet at the center is real: a beautifully preserved amusement ride, photographed and transformed through layers of digital painting into something between memory and dream. Around it a surreal dreamscape opens up: kaleidoscopic spirals, vivid reds, deep greens, spinning color, a portal in the corner leading somewhere else entirely.
This is where imagination lives when you are young. Not in open sky, but in a world that follows its own rules — vivid, boundless, entirely your own.
The invitation stands. Won't you come fly with me?
With thanks to Hudson Goods blog for allowing a derivative work from their remarkable vintage amusement ride jet. (It would also make the most incredible lighting fixture. Just saying.)
Exhibited at Abstracts & Surrealism, Escondido Municipal Gallery / Escondido Arts Partnership, June 10 – July 2, 2016.
