If you just nodded your head yes, I’m relieved I’m not alone, I mean - that’s good news for you. Have you ever done anything odd like that? Like Varo, I suppose I was banking on the stuff being infused with the creative enchantment of the place by dawn. When I was done I saw I had carefully alternated my found red rocks with pointed clear quartz crystals, and writing pens in a circle atop a new, blank Moleskin notebook. “Natural Arch, Arches National Park, Utah,” photo by Thea Fiore-Bloom, 2018.īefore I went to sleep on the last night of our stay, I almost unconsciously started arranging natural objects I’d found on the trip along with my writing supplies and a new necklace I’d bought under the amber glow of a harvest moon on the little deck we had overlooking the rushing river. Just last year my boyfriend and I were hiking in Utah, staying at a cabin on the Colorado River next to Arches National Park. I just don’t admit it, apparently even to myself.īut here is what I remembered 10 seconds after reading that passage about Varo and the moon fruit that put me in the same camp as her. But then ten seconds past.Įmbarrassingly, I realized I’ve done similar stuff. When I first read that story I thought this gal Varo could be slightly unstable or at least taking this whole “I’m a creative” thing too far. She felt this conjunction of the special plant, her paints, and the moon might prove auspicious for the next day of painting,” (Kaplan).Īrtist Remedios Varo and Cat. Fascinated, she took one to her apartment, set it among her plants on the terrace in full moonlight, and carefully nestled tubes of paint around it. “ Strolling along a Mexican street one evening, she noticed plants with beautiful white egglike fruits. By that I mean she found magic in, or made magic out of - regular stuff. Varo (1908 -1963) gave her cosmic-sized imagination the freedom to roam both her art life and her daily life.

Like many Spanish and Mexican painters of her day, Remedios Varo was a magical realist.

Remedios Varo created three hundred and eighty-four paintings “ peopled by owl-artists, insect -geologists, crazed botanists and magical astronomers who overturn our arbitrary assumptions about how things ought to work,” writes Janet Kaplan in Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys. Why You Too, Should Be Excited About “Moon Fruit” and Writing Letters to Strangers

Remedios varo unexpected journeys