May imagination be with you: Craig Davison’s Star Wars art reawakens the child in each of us

We are all Luke in our imaginations (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)
We are all Luke in our imaginations (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)

 

I learnt a long time ago how powerful imagination can be.

A budding writer from the moment I realised two words could come together with devastatingly brilliant effect, leaving wonderment, thrills, excitement, fear, adventure and a whole host of other authentically real human emotional reactions in their wake, I have been enthralled with the places my imagination can take me.

But even I, budding Hemingway that I have been most of my life, refused to sit at my desk all the time, and many a summer evening in the 1970s found me running around my backyard, either alone or with my sister, fighting imaginary enemies, holed in my imaginary castle (in reality a tall, low hanging bush) and surveying my kingdom, armed with little more than a stick and a cardboard box shield.

Our games were reasonably conventional – Kings and Queens, Cowboys and Indians, nameless adventurers across lands both Earthbound and in space – until one day in 1977 when my mother took me to a small one theatre wooden cinema in the main street of Ballina, NSW to see a small film called Star Wars and my world, my imagination, every game I’d ever played and wanted to play, every story I longed to write, was utterly and forever transformed.

Suddenly I wanted to be Luke or Han swashbuckling my way across the Death Star to rescue a Princess Leia, or C-3PO and R2-D2 slipping in under the nose of the evil Imperial forces and playing havoc with technology, or Obi-Wan guiding Luke to a whole new life on the hot, harsh sands of Tatooine not long after his old one had violently gone forever.

It was intoxicatingly wonderful, and now Craig Davison, who has magically combined scenes of children at play with iconic characters and images from Star Wars has taken me back to those heady, euphoric days in 1977 when everything seemed marvellously possible, and magically far far away from my small backyard where it was entirely likely Sand People and Gredo lurked in places I had yet to explore.

And yes you can buy his prints and turn your home once again into that same imagination-stoking world you once inhabited with carefree fun and imagination as a child.

(source: Nerdist)

 

Who didn't turn a boring afternoon babysitting a little brother or sister into an intergalactic adventure in which the universe, and not a plate of half-chewed food, hung in the balance? (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)
Who didn’t turn a boring afternoon babysitting a little brother or sister into an intergalactic adventure in which the universe, and not a plate of half-chewed food, hung in the balance? (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)

 

Suddenly, somewhere in the middle of 1977, all the old childlike battles gave way to utterly new ones, many featuring a corrupted helmeted lord of darkness and an earnest young lord of light (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)
Suddenly, somewhere in the middle of 1977, all the old childlike battles gave way to utterly new ones, many featuring a corrupted helmeted lord of darkness and an earnest young lord of light (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)

 

Take one cardboard box, a fecund imagination and a percolating sense of adventure and a dreary afternoon of not much going on became a race through the galaxy thwarting criminals and dictators (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)
Take one cardboard box, a fecund imagination and a percolating sense of adventure and a dreary afternoon of not much going on became a race through the galaxy thwarting criminals and dictators (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)

 

Armed with clever retorts, all the umbrage in the world and the ability to open doors on Death Stars just in the nick of time, who didn't want to be C-3PO and R2-D2? (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)
Armed with clever retorts, all the umbrage in the world and the ability to open doors on Death Stars just in the nick of time, who didn’t want to be C-3PO and R2-D2? (image via Nerdist (c) Craig Davison)

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