FOREWORD

The most influential factor in my work is my battle with insomnia. After being awake for so long, the line between reality and imagination starts to fade. Eventually, the unconscious mind takes over reality and consciousness slips into the background. For me, it is an experience similar to what Terence McKenna describes in his work as a psychedelic traveller. Although I am perfectly lucid, wide awake and will remember everything, another world comes forward. A world deep into the unconscious, beyond the Anima and Animus, where the Jungian self resides. A world with its own emotions, physics and morals, like a waking dream. Through the whole thing, I am helpless, ever the observer in my own experience.

The majority of my work is produced in this state. Most of them created between two and four am after long days or weeks of insomnia. My aim is not to be the storyteller, but merely the one who assembles the elements for people to tell their own stories, if they choose to do so.

As it is said in the Talmud: the dream is its own interpretation.

Stanley Wany

Remember, This Never Happened [detail] 2013

Remember, This Never Happened [detail] 2013

Pen and ink on Bristol 35.6 x 129.5 cm

All of The Yesterdays and Tomorrows 2019

Ink and markers on Strathmore paper