In many ways my early paintings always represented a challenge to me.  Sometimes they are wicked and full of traps and sometimes they are illustrations, if you like, of childhood fairy tales and fantasies that are of my own making.  I still dream about them and get frightened by them, probably because anything, terrifying or joyful, or preferably both, can happen in them. 

     —from an unpublished interview with Victoria Carruthers, 2009, quoted in her essay “Dorothea Tanning and Her Gothic Imagination,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 5, no. 1 (2011), p. 140.