THREE TRAVELLERS IN MEXICO.

Abstract

Three monk-like, sexually ambiguous figures sit in castellated towers. A soft light shines in each room, focused from a different interior source. One figure is a painter, one is a writer, and one sits drinking from a cup of wine. Each is independent, each unaware of the other. Yet, hovering in the air, a barely visible spindle connects the three figures to a distant star. The artist described this as “a complicated machine from which come pulleys that wind around them and make them move (they think they move freely)... [but] the destiny of these people... unbeknownst to them, is intertwined and one day their lives will cross”. The artist is the great Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo, and three lives did eventually cross, pulled as if by synchronicity to act out the narrative of her painting, three women who, independently, had carved a similar artistic vision. It was a magic meeting, the meeting of P.K. Page, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington in Mexico in 1960. They were antic, hilarious, and deeply committed to their art. What was that friendship like? We are so used to the traditional scenario of the young woman artist taken under the mentorship of the older male artist. Each of these women had had that kind of experience in their youth, when they played the muse at the centre of an artistic circle–Carrington and Varo for the surrealist circles in France; Page for the Preview poets in Montreal. What would it be like to glimpse inside the process of imaginative cross-fertilization when it is taking place entirely in