The Imaginarium by Mark Hoppmann

A book I came across soon after graduating from college almost 40 years ago, planted the seed for The Imaginarium. The title now escapes me, but the story and the illustrations were in the style of Shel Silverstein. A detective, (picture Inspector Clouseau), peers intently through his magnifying glass at footprints while a small puppy followed directly behind him devouring everything in its path. As the footprints grew larger and the clues more terrifying, the puppy following behind the inspector grew proportionately larger and more terrifying, until too late, the inspector turns just as the giant dog devours him in one bite. The detective’s past and his future had become one and the same.

The theme was perfect for a vivid dreamer such as myself. To a vivid dreamer, dreams are a wonderful experience.  I walk through the back door of my grandfather’s workshop on the edge of a wheatfield in Nebraska only to emerge onto a great battle in the Arabian desert. I can traverse time and space as I hurtle to far off planets, passing through distant galaxies, or huddle in the shadows of a train station somewhere in Europe in the dark of night, while hiding from some unknown terror. Sometimes dreams are merely strange.

The Imaginarium is comprised of two dream sequences.  One is titled Creation Chronicle, while the other is titled, The Garden of Earthly Delights.  Both give the reader somewhat of an idea of what being inside of my head during two dreams might be like. As In dreams, the book is an enigma. Both dream sequences travel seamlessly forwards and back in time simultaneously, much as dreams do. In short, the end of both dreams starts at the beginning, their beginning starts at the end, and both dreams meet in the middle.

The conceptual sketches took almost a year to create and the finished drawings another 6 months, while I worked on the sequences. I decided to create the finished drawings on 180gsm Stonehenge paper because the wire side and felt side of the paper were virtually indistinguishable from each other, making it ideal for drawing on both sides of the paper and I decided to make the book oversize to utilize the original deckled edges from the parent sheet. The heavier weight paper also made it easier to make circular cut outs to emphasize the quality of moving forwards and backwards simultaneously when viewing the illustrations.  For sake of continuity, I had to think in terms of working on four drawings simultaneously on both preceding and subsequent pages.