Vanessa Berlein Portfolio: What the circus left behind

What the circus left behind #1

Below the neighbourhood where I live, is a circus tent. It has been there longer than I have lived here - A place offering hope, and the tutoring of acrobatics to over 300 children, many of them living on the streets. The owners have struggled to keep it going, and in 2015 they were given an eviction notice. I don't know if it is still used, but I pass it every day and the grass has grown long around the tent pegs and the nets are wanton of knots and repair. I think about it often.
As a child, I saw the movie "The greatest show on Earth" and wanted, like many children to run away and join the circus. It represented magic and play and all the seemed wonderful, and then as an adult I saw the film "Freaks" which was filmed in 1932, and tells a different story of circus, and makes you never want to go to the circus again. But the crazy wonder of circuses and fairs, and all they represent, is pretty universal.
Doing the paintings of elements of circuses left behind, void of humans and life and nesting in dark landscape with a golden glow burnishing all and everything, gives me chance to escape to a world of my imaginings.