The painting pictured here, “Everyday Blessings” was finished a couple of months ago, but it reminds me of this dream.  The more I inquire into the world of my dreams, my art, and my spiritual growth, the more I see how they relate to each other.  Magic happens every day.  It is important for me to remind myself of this especially when I am feeling a lack of connection between my reality and dreams.

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit disconnected from my dreams, my art, my passions in life.  Feeling too busy, I’ve been trapped in a warped sense of reality where I never feel quite caught up.  Part of this is because I’ve been in a whirlwind between doing art shows, keeping up with wholesale orders of my prints and pendants, moving my household, filing my taxes, etc.  Now, as I ready myself for cranking out salable artworks for the coming holiday season, I ask myself if I will ever have time to truly return to my original passion of painting without always thinking about sales and survival.  I long to have nothing to do but explore my dreams, my art, the stirrings of my creative imagination.  I think this dream’s purpose was to remind me of this creative fire and the fact that it is still very much alive within me.

Here’s a couple more paintings that I created in the past few months.  I hope to have many more to come soon!

"Good Day, Sunshine"

"Jay's Blues"

I’ve been craving a bit of solitude lately.  Speaking of this need to a friend, she offered me her place for the weekend, while she was out of town.  After sharing houses for years, this small break was like heaven for me.  I decided to make it into my own little creative/spiritual retreat.  The focus was to read, write, walk, paint and meditate… and nothing else.   I highly recommend this to anyone who feels overwhelmed by the pressures of the everyday.  Whatever it is that engages you with your higher self, focus on nothing but this for a day, a weekend, a week… whatever you can afford to give yourself.

At the outset, I decided not to judge whatever I produced.  This is time for me, not for pumping out salable artwork.  Sometimes the pressure of that is itself debilitating.  I wanted to flow with whatever came up for me.

I started the painting above a little before the retreat, but brought it along to have at least one thing that already had a beginning.  It was the freshest thing in my studio.  It began with star-shaped flowers…. then the swirling sky.  I started to see a bird in the sky, so I painted that.  Then I saw the woman.  It’s not finished, but I sort of like it this way right now.  When I come to a place where I don’t know what to do next, I stop.  I feed my senses with something else until the next step announces itself.  I read, walk or I paint something else.

I was at a loss about what to paint next.  Mostly, I give myself too many choices, so my biggest dilemma is making a decision.  I got up to make some tea and looked at Joy’s walls for a little while.  I found myself staring at a madonna image.  Mind you, I’m not a religious person (in the traditional way, at least), but when a little voice in my head told me to “paint myself as the goddess”, I decided to do it.  The result is less goddess than peasant, but there’s something I like about it.   One problem I had was that the only mirror I had with me was a two inch magnifying mirror, so I can’t see my whole face in it.  I can see one eye, a nose, my lips in isolation… but could not see the whole at once.  So I decided that was my challenge, to figure out how to make them work together. I struggled with the proportions.  I’ve finally come to a place with it that I recognize myself, though there is some odd distortions.  It still needs some work, but I don’t want to overwork it. I want to leave it partly unfinished.

(When Joy came back, she was surprised, and told me that she put that madonna image up for me, and wondered if I would see myself in it).

I started a couple other little paintings which are still in their beginning stages.  In both, I started with a textured background by pressing plastic wrap into wet paint.  It was easy to see trees, branches and leaves in this, so I took out my oil pastels and started to define these shapes.  Not too surprisingly, a river formed in both of these paintings as well.  The image of water and trees is something that bubbles up in meditation frequently these days.   I visualize this body of water (a stream or river more than an ocean).  At first, I am only aware of the reflections on the water.  The water reflects the sky and shadows of trees above.  I feel gently pulled into it.  It’s like I am on an invisible boat.  I don’t have a body, but I sense myself being pulled along the river.  I am lost in the motion of ripples, the reflection, the shadows.  This is the archetypal landscape of my soul: water, trees, sky…

I realize that I want to paint from the source more frequently.  To go outside and paint what I see in the reflections of the water.  But it was a rainy weekend, so I decided “the source” was whatever I could pull out of what I saw in the paint.  These are timid beginnings so far, but I see the potential already.  Again, I like looking at the work before it’s been fully realized.

Another thing I thought about painting (but didn’t) was a pomegranate, based on images that have come up in both meditations and dreams.  But when I opened the fruit, I was confounded by the complexity of hundreds of seeds.  I decided to do a photographic study instead, to help me decide how I wanted to approach the subject before I try to paint it.  The night before I went out to purchase the pomegranate, I burned a candle that overflowed.  I picked up the wax and realized that it also resembled the pomegranate, so I posed it with the fruit, which seemed to emphasize the sense of oozing.  I ran the image through some Photoshop filters to see how different colors affected the image.

In my dream during this retreat, I was eating the pomegranite seeds (sharing it with Joy, who was sharing her home with me).  I looked down on my plate and was surprised to see that the seeds were glowing like little light-bulbs.  I knew it was about embracing the feminine archetype… to learn about and hold this power… and to realize that my connection to this world is through the senses, to embrace that also.

This is the artwork I am entering into the “Dreams” show at the Launchpad Gallery, located at 534 SE Oak Street, in Portland. The opening is this Friday, October 3, from 6-10 pm. There’s expected to be over 60 artists showing work in the “dreams theme”.

It’s been a while since I’ve created an artwork that was strictly related to the interpretation of a dream, but since I almost always begin and end a painting without knowing my next step (preferring to start with one image and free associate til the painting completes itself), I think of the painting process as one which is very similar to a dreaming process, anyway. In this particular case, I began with the image of the bird, then added the plants. The semi-transparent woman and swirls decided to materialize at around 2 am the night before the deadline to get this painting into the gallery. Deadlines sometimes help to get the painting from dreaming into actualization… and off the easel.

Whenever I get into a period of time when I’m not in a completely regular painting habit, it takes a while for the ideas to begin to emerge. During these times, I feel it’s best to stay open to practically anything my mind wants to entertain.

So why am I painting a lady with a funny hat? Something about painting faces gives me an immediate sense of grounding. I don’t know who this woman is, but she feels oddly familiar to me. Yet, painting a simple portrait feels pretty boring to me. I need some element of fantasy or outlandish detail that keeps me entertained. Now I’m amused by the idea of creating a whole series of people wearing funny hats… or perhaps things that aren’t supposed to be hats (like animals and flowers and birds-nests).

The content aspect of my work often trips me up. The first question is always WHAT to paint. And if I’m feeling stuck, the question becomes a painful deliberation between numerous prospects. Sometimes I have too many ideas. The best thing is just to start with something… anything that I feel I can commit to for the first 10 minutes, and then the creative pixies keep the juices flowing.

The artist’s cooperative gallery that I belong to (“Six Days”, on Alberta Street in Portland) are having a group show related to the theme of Las Vegas. We are calling the show “Six Days in Vegas”. I came home from a meeting on the subject, complaining to my partner that I had to come up with a painting with a Vegas theme, and I’m pretty anti-Vegas in my aesthetics. He pointed out that I already had a painting on my easel that would do the trick. So I added some feathers, changed her blouse to a silky spaghetti strap, reversed the orientation of the background panel… and, Voila!… she’s a show-girl! I renamed the piece, “Vegas Night, 3 a.m.” I’m still contemplating whether I should add a cigarette danging from her mouth.