Max Ernst in Sedona

The surrealist Max Ernst in Sedona, Arizona.

He talks to the rocks. He tells them who he is and he’s impressed by their stoicism. He hasn’t lost his good looks but the Navajo women aren’t interested in the painter who sits half-naked under a Jojoba tree and asks about spirits and sauces because he likes his potatoes with thick sauce like Germans do. This is, for him, a sign that he’s alive. Nobody here has heard of him but they believe him because he can draw like a god. One of the women tell the others: his lines come alive like snakes. He shows them his ankles where the painted serpents bit him. He bled red ink. He calls every Indian ‘lady’. One of them reminds him of his mother another of a whore in Berlin. He looks at the sky long and hard as if the sky could come down and settle on his canvas like a tamed animal. His dreams, at night, get up and walk around the compound all by themselves, making up landscapes.

This story is part of my collection THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPERM. Published before at Camroc Press Review (07/2011). This story appeared first at the kaffe in katmandu. Please stop by and enjoy art and writing there. On the story itself: I feel strongly about painting and sculptures of the surrealist Max Ernst who was also a pioneer of the Dada movement and whose alchemical style still inspires across the world. Examples below: collages in his graphical novel Une semaine de bonté (“A Week of Kindness”, 1934) which will blow the fur off your tongue; check out this eerie Russian site (god knows which virus you’ll catch here) – art and meteorology – with “The Nymph Echo” in the background, the sublimated feminine immersed in a lush jungle world; Ernst’s “the eye of silence” embedded in a tumbling blog; Ernst with his wise alter ego, ‘Loplop‘; the ultimate anti-penguin piece, “Bonjour Satanas“; Max and Dorothea Tanning – hiding behind a picture frame or framing their relationship? (Click on thumbnails to open an enlarged version in a new window.) For much more: see here.