Night before last I dreamt of being strapped to the front of a tourism gorilla, like a baby in one of those front pouches, we bounced around. It was an unfortunate leg of an African trip. I’d flown on a small plane in, then took a train, where I lost my childhood gymnastics team duffel bag. It’s funny what the mind does with the stuff you load into it. When I have dreams, even weird ones, I’m comforted- it’s much less harmless than accusations and hostilities posited by peers in waking life. What a shame that we castle into our disadvantages. I’ve been paranoid.
Last night in a dream I inhabited a world not unlike Silver Springs, Florida, where my family camped a couple times for family reunions. I was under eight at the time. This place caught my imagination like a sweater thread, and if you asked me to unravel, it might have something to do with the glitter of the sun across the lake, or the pine needles outside of the rent-a-cabin, or the wooden paver-blocks making a coral for the family van. SO in my dream, I was myself, my age, and an artist in residence, violet and creamed whites, -pthaloey blacks, small flares of macaroni orange-yellow. My residence was a tow-behind camper. It had water leaks and sat crooked, it was parked in a kind of playground, Kentucky-made hydraulic trailers abounded, the neighbors were the type of my step-grandmother, and blood grandfather on mom’s side- working class mechanics, truck drivers. I had a stoat, or a stoat was present, an ermine, a white one like in the Leonardo painting. (I can’t tell purples from blues, so isn’t it funny to dream of one and not the other? ). The stoat became a black Pine Martin, and joined a less dynamic Red Panda. They climbed onto a playground fixture before I came to.
In the middle of the night I awoke with a vision of a bronze horse. Id sculpted it and was making a drawing and planning to paint it. My painting was anticipated by spectators and adulators. In dreams, darkness envelops and details float, This may be why those old paintings were so dark. I’m making darker paintings recently. Part of the gig is up regarding plugging in past solutions to PAFA paintings. I had a crit the other day, and my solutions were regarded as ‘banal’, and ‘contrived’. It was a relief- they were. I posted a video to social media and was replied to with praise, but I knew the crit was spot on. I was over the paintings and buffed them. The attitude to preserve paintings for posterity and to start on fresh surfaces each time is gone, I’m looking forward to painting over these older paintings. Yes, I did document them with a photograph first. This same dream but a little earlie I remember a haunting feeling. My work was haunted, I am haunted by my work- one of these things. I didn’t eat before bed, tapering from lunchtime, and I could feel my body heal in the night, going through whack food I’ve been putting into it. I wrestled restlessly like in grips of a fever, but it was my body going through the poisons I’d put in to it.
I thought the other day how I didn’t have dreams of painting, and wasn’t that peculiar because I Shane so much time doing that. Now it’s clear to me that I am painting in my dreams, it’s a calling from the ether, with visitors, and hauntings. It’s vivid, it bleeds.
