A Year Ago.....

A year ago a friend suggested I start writing down my dreams at night. I had told them about a reoccurring dream where I couldn’t remember my high school locker combination or my class schedule, so I would just keep wandering the halls in perpetuity. Evidently, being lost is a common dream that a Jungian would interpret as my psyche trying to tell me to pay attention.
So I began writing down my dreams and not only did my psyche indeed have a lot to tell me but the practice of writing down my dreams has changed the way I approach making paintings.

I realized that I was focusing too much of my energy on thinking and not enough on being in my body where feelings reside and are percieved. By working to be less deterministic in my life and embrace ambiguity I found that my painting practice changing. Now when I begin a painting I do less planning and thinking in my mind about what I want it to be like, and I allow unexpected colors and forms to develop. I'm surprised at what develops on the surface of the canvas which seems to have a connection to my dreams along with images, objects, birds, and weather which I expereince in my day time life.
Many of my recent paintings are of the dusk or the night when the full moon is in the sky; a mysterious beacon whose orbit is mind boggeling. The image of a pond came from finding a small unexpected pond in a field near Point Reyes Station in California, in the early morning. Mist was rising from the pond disguising a pair of Red Ducks who had made the pond their home. It was a magical moment that I carried with me and which now plays an important compositional and mystical role in the paintings; a grounded, earthly counterpart to the round globe of light in the distant sky.
I still catch myself wanting to know what the dark, the moon, the pond, the flowing colors and shapes mean; to devise some smart explanation for why I have painted the paintings the way it is. Then I remember I don’t have to do that. It is more important to feel.

Out Of This World 20" x 24" o/c 2026