Many couples share their fantasies, but I don’t think many couples share an imaginary circus. My wife and I do, though.
A few years ago we spent our holidays in Toscane. Of course, we visited Florence and Pisa and all the other famous places. However, we fell in love with Poggibonsi although we did never visit this little city. We only saw the name on the route signs on our way to wine tasting events.
I can assure you it had nothing to do with the wine, but we immediately loved the name of this place. Poggibonsi, it’s the kind of word you would want to say all day. And we did: Pog-gi-bon-si, PoggiBÓNsi, Poggi-Bonsi, POGGIBONSI!

Circus Poggibonsi was born!

We felt that Poggibonsi would be a great name for a circus, and thus Circus Poggibonsi was born!
At first, the artists were just our own pets. The dogs we had at that time and also all the animals we had owned in the past. They gave spectacular shows together. -Yes, my wife and I can come up with a good imaginary show!
Later on, lots of other animals joined the circus. Like zebras, vultures, fleas, pigs, ants, guinea pigs, bats, sloths and giraffes. Any animal we could think of came to perform. All of them awe-inspiring artists, born for the spotlights. In real life I don’t like performances with wild animals at all, but here they were happily volunteering. We could almost smell the sawdust and taste the popcorn. We felt our hearts beating in our chests with anticipation.
After a week, we went back home to our normal lives and we took Circus Poggibonsi with us. It has remained with us, and we still get the occasional show.

We could almost smell the sawdust

Obviously, Wondrous Goose had to make at least one artwork called Circus Poggibonsi. But I have got the feeling there are more to come.

I have made a short video of the process of putting a Wondrous Goose surreal artwork together in Photoshop. There is a lot of cutting and working very precisely with the erasers and most importantly, Photoshop masks. In the process, I use many layers. Each layer has its own part in the design. The rabbit on layer one, the hat on layer number two, the shawl on layer three, and so on. This means that when I move one thing, it doesn’t affect other parts of the image, because every part has its own layer.

There’s a lot of try and error involved in my collages.

I spend a lot of time searching for pictures, mostly by crawling my own archive. There’s a lot of try and error involved in making my collages. Sometimes I have a great idea and only realize when figuring it out it in Photoshop, that it won’t work. You can witness this journey in the middle of the video. All in all, I love the creative process. I worked on this surreal picture for about five to six hours a day for three days. It never bores me.