A Day at the Circus

From the time he was little, my son Arie and I planned to one day join a circus for a year and see what it was like.  Being a child playing hooky for a school year, he would feed the animals, and I’d earn my keep making drawings of the performers practicing, and making circus posters, and paintings of the circus acts and animals. It was a project inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, but appealed to Arie as much as to me. The dream is still alive— these photographs were taken many years later as preliminary toes in the water. Circuses remain in the realm of our dreams, our hopes and aspirations. I have enhanced these ethereal images to make them even more dreamlike. The circus year still hasn’t happened to join me if I should be found hiding out in an elephant’s boxcar.

Tap or click the thumbnails to view larger images.