How many simultaneous thoughts do we harbor in a second? How many images flash through our minds? Are these images related to each other? How? Gretta Johnson has pondered these questions and others, and made lyrically executed painterly renditions suggesting her own multi-layered meanderings through memory, concept and form. Though she began her current series by a purely stream-of-consciousness process in watercolor, at some point her visual adventures brought her to recollections of childhood questions about the Wizard of Oz. If the Scarecrow didn’t have a brain, and the Tin Man didn’t have a heart, then the Tin Man must have had brain, and if so, what actually was in his tin-can head? Images from the film began to appear in her watercolors, and soon she was off on an exciting journey, a journey that quickly took her way beyond the classic film. The resulting paintings, now on view at Tappeto Volante Projects through Dec. 17, are the paintings of an imaginative artist with a chromatic sense of dynamic color and movement, and of an artist who reads and thinks about philosophy and psychology. Painting thread-like webworks of colored lines interweaving and metaphorically suggesting the circuitry within our brains and bodies, and the film’s “yellow-brick road” connectively meandering between forms and objects, while thoughts from Irene Gad’s book about Carl Jung and Tarot floated through her imagination, Johnson created work with glorious outbursts of joy, an overall awe of life, and a sense of life breathing through every impulse. Perhaps Johnson is channeling Jung’s collective unconscious and his sense that we are made up of parts, to suggest that through creativity our atomized parts gracefully merge and become a generous explosion of possibilities.