April Street’s paintings are a blend of fantasy and vision. Many of her canvases are quite large – up to six feet in height and width. They are like a psychedelic fireworks show from your dreams. Street’s work is shown at The Arts Company, a well-known art gallery in downtown Nashville. Gallery owner Anne Brown also sponsors a showing of Street’s paintings once a year. Although she’s based in Los Angeles, there’s a reason why Street shows up in Tennessee. She’s lived in the Volunteer State and received a fine arts degree in painting from East Tennessee State University.

My favorite local show of Street’s was based on The Swimmers,” a series of large-scale paintings that were the result of an intensive year-long focus on the interplay of history and fantasy. The paintings are partially inspired by prehistoric drawings of swimming figures discovered in Egypt in 1933. The area is now a desert and an area where it’s impossible to swim. Another trigger for series of fantasy paintings is an event that happened in Tennessee, also in 1933. That’s when legislation was passed that allowed the Tennessee Valley Authority to flood certain parts of the Tennessee Valley. The flooding concealed parts of history, and also added a layer to the earth’s surface.