Dream within a dream
The picture begins with a pair of eyes staring at you, perched in the middle of an impressionistic bunch of clouds that look like they are really ocean waves, turned upside down, doused in superglue and pasted onto the sky. A friendly-looking green monster with a speech balloon invites you to shop, a brain or a queer football redirects you to a blog and if you want to reach out, a solitary ship with a postal address floats by to your aid. All around you on the screen, there are monsters with ridiculously detailed, leafy heads, chasing technicolour puzzle boxes. Beneath it all, the visage of the creator appears at last. He’s wearing a pair of paper goggles, cut in the shape of screaming gargoyles, their mouths agape in anticipation.
Welcome to Theo Ellsworth’s world. So far, you’ve only traversed the home page of his website, Thought Cloud Factory. A self-taught artist, Ellsworth is known, above all, for Capacity, his self-published series of mini-comics, later compiled into a graphic novel of the same name. Ellsworth is concerned, above all, about the nature of dreams and how they uniquely impact artists. Is reality only a less lucid version of an artist’s dream? Is there no way to channelise the sublime moments of our dreamscapes without also compromising one’s sense of what’s real? As one navigates Thought Cloud Factory, one realises that this paradox is central to everything Ellsworth writes or draws (His most recent sketch, on the blog, is titled “The Ghost Doctor is wearing his Cosmic Relaxation Helmet again today”.)
If you haven’t come across Ellsworth’s work before, be forewarned: it is like little else in comics or in mainstream art. — Aditya Mani Jha