Originally posted on Combustus: http://combustus.com/a-cold-story-on-a-warm-night-the-mischief-making-of-pamela-wilson/

Behind a smoke colored curtain,
the girl disappeared
They found out that the ring was a fake

And I want to know the same thing
Everyone wants to know
How’s it going to end?

~ from, “How’s it Gonna End?” Written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Waits-Brennan

Something happens when as children we endure circumstances wildly outside of our control, especially situations where whom to trust and whom to fear gets all topsy-turvy jumbled up. All we know is that our world has become unsafe and unpredictable, and for many, the only remaining place where life makes any sense at all is within one’s own mind. There, only characters carefully crafted by the child herself are permitted entry.

And oh, but what a rich and wondrous place that can be. Especially if that imagination is honed and nurtured, as many creative writers, dancers, musicians, poets, scientists, scholars and painters will attest to.

All it takes is a hell of a lot of courage.

“I see everything in elaborate pictures,” contemporary American artist Pamela Wilson shares, in the interview that follows. “Everything has a gender, a color, a place. Dark is not dark. Rather, it’s a situation. I have a hard time explaining how I see things; I have never fully been able to describe my visual world…My sister used to call me ‘mental’ for asking if her big toe was bossy, and if it was a boy or a girl.”