The Circus Appears. A Strange Synchronicity

Sometimes the stories find us before we even know what they are about.

A friend recently recommended The Midnight Library, and I began reading it without any idea what I was stepping into. I thought it would simply be a good book—something quiet to hold in the evenings.

But almost immediately, it opened into the very themes I’ve been painting: parallel lives, unseen paths, the feeling that other worlds exist beside this one, shimmering just out of reach.

At the same time, I’ve been working on my Cigány series—paintings that feel like a theater or circus that appears in a parallel dimension. A place that arrives through atmosphere rather than logic. A performance that exists somewhere between memory and dream.

And then I remembered The Night Circus, a book I loved deeply—the idea of a circus that appears without warning, like magic unfolding behind the ordinary world.

It struck me how often this happens in the creative life:

You begin with an image.

A feeling.

A doorway.

And only later do you realize the world has been sending you echoes all along.

Maybe that is part of what art is.

A kind of entanglement between inner life and outer story.

A way of noticing the threads.

Cigány continues to arrive for me this way—one act at a time.

A violinist.

A wagon.

A lantern-lit threshold.

And I’m learning to trust that when the circus appears, it is always for a reason.

More soon, from the quiet backstage of Oz.

~Shannon

From the painted worlds of Oz — where horses, lanterns, and hidden stories meet.

This is a small glimpse from a larger work still unfolding — The Drabani Arrives. The wagon has entered the world, but the full scene will be revealed in time, act by act, here at Oz. Thank you for stepping backstage with me.

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