I dream paintings

Hope – me

In one, I’d completely let go of figurative work and was beginning pure abstraction.

Who was it that said that realistic/representational work is about something and abstract art is about itself? I think it was Vonnegut in Bluebeard. I gotta find and reread.

Orange and Yellow – Rothko

Though I once agreed with that sentiment, I don’t now. All art tells a story. The question is, do you speak the language that a Rothko, Diebenkorn or Tàpies painted?

In this particular dream, The Amazing Bob and I were living in Chicago (a place we had both once lived, before we knew each other. Incredibly, there was life before TAB and Donna). Our crib was some tiny oblong box of a loft style apartment.

He was heading out the door to see some pals when he saw that I was having a mondo, depressing struggle with a new, large piece. TAB came back in and held me while I sobbed out my I’m-such-a-shitty-painter despair.

He soothed and encouraged me – you’re just beginning on this new path OF COURSE you’re not getting what you want right off. Things take time. Cut yourself some slack.

Yup.

In the next dream, still in Chicago, the wife of a man I once knew, had just, at the age of 60, begun painting. Her work was Paul Klee-ish by-way-of-Lee-Krasner. I really liked it. I was also stunned and a smidge and a half jealous. She was telling me about a one woman show she’d just been offered at a major gallery.

The Angler – Paul Klee

If I could go back in time and tweak my personality, I would up my self-confidence and fearless quotients – I’d turn the timidity down to near nothing. Wouldn’t it be awesome magic if we could, on recognizing our flaws, just flip a switch – ratchet down the volume on the shit that’s holding us back/tripping us up?

...evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. 

And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

Or maybe I won't reread Bluebeard today. Vonnegut, though brilliant and witty, could be awfully fucking depressing. Maybe I'll just dive farther into the two new paintings I've got goin' on. One is a portrait of an old friend (stylistically inspired by Cian McLoughlin). The other is/will be a reclining nude in the midst of dreams.

Yes, there will be pics if these turn out better than cat puke on canvas.