Dragonfly Dreamer: A René Magritte Kind Of Day

Edward James in Front of On the Threshold of Liberty, 1937
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967)
Gelatin silver print

4 1/4 x 6 9/16 in. (10.8 x 16.7 cm)
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell,

1987 (1987.1100.157)

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phsr/ho_1987.1100.157.htm

This past winter, I came across some of the work by a famous Belgian surrealist artist, Magritte. I became fascinated by his work. His pieces have a way of not only turning the world on its head, but of allowing one to look at everything upside-down, backward, and inside-out, all at the same time. That which has been taken for granted as reality is suddenly, dramatically, shadowed by doubt. The new rule is to question and re-question everything you see, hear and think, and then question even this new rule as well.

After reading about and seeing several on-line examples of his work, I had a couple of interesting, surreal type of personal experiences. Now, this past winter, the usually mild, Pacific NW climate seemed nowhere to be found. (It's still missing-in-action, since the last couple of days have been over 90° F which is crazy this early in June!). This winter was much colder and snowier than I can ever remember seeing it around here. I not only had to cancel a trip to Portland, OR to see the Oregon Ballet Theater performance of "The Nutcracker" (which is supposedly very well done each year), but I also couldn't even make it down to spend Christmas with my family! (Thank goodness, I had some wonderful friends in the area to spend it with!)

The snow had altered the usual gray, rainy winter landscape around me into a barely recognizable white world. Although, I believe that it was studying René Magritte's work just the night before, that most influenced me into seeing the world in a strange way. I was wading in the snow to catch a bus that would get me close to my work one morning (very few buses or vehicles of any kind were running since my area isn't equipped for much snow fall and few roads were plowed or deiced or anything helpful). On one road, where some plowing had actually taken place, the snow plow had pushed large chunks of dirty snow onto the sidewalk, but did my surrealist-influenced mind see just dirty chunks of snow? No, of course not. I saw that this snow looked like the remains of some kind of snowmen warfare. I could picture rows and rows of snowmen marching into battle, and then, afterwards, those unfortunate casualties lay all over the battlefield, blown into many dirty, snowy pieces.

As if this experience wasn't enough, later that same day, I was trudging home through snow up to knees (Again! What a long week that turned out to be!) when I came across a bunch of orange traffic cones on the side of the street. They were there to mark off part of the sidewalk and road where some construction had been taking place before the weather put a halt to it. Now, those cones were buried so that only part of their little orange tops could be seen peeking out of the snow. Still having my thought patterns influenced by René Magritte's work, all I could think when I saw the traffic cones like that was that they looked like a bunch of gnomes that had been buried in an avalanche. Poor gnomes! I was almost tempted to try to dig them out, but I didn't. Hey, I'm not that crazy!

The best part of these experiences is that I was, for one day at least, able to look at the world from a totally different perspective. René Magritte had opened up a window to a view that I may never have seen otherwise. I'm grateful for this opportunity to stretch my imagination and think outside of the box.