under-construction

Dreams. They are the record and subject matter for all my morse code paintings these days.They have punctuated my life in ebb and flow. An acupuncturist I respected use to ask about the elements in my dreams and the role they played in the imagery and story. Earth, wood, fire, water, metal: you find them hinting of the strengths and weaknesses you are meandering through. Dreams are a lot like the 2 little pricks that sit on your shoulders, the one forever innocent whispering in your ear, "behold a road, let's explore it!". And the other one pinching it's dick, whispering "screw that, indulge and panic you mutt!". When I bought my derelict house in Sowebo I constantly had troubled dreams about it. Immersed in mud on an abandoned beaches, a Lincoln-log puzzle smoldering in collapsed beams, snaggle toothed brick mazes for ever falling. I was totally stressed by angry elements. Then one night I dreamed I was dangerously high hammering off plaster, exposing original brick. There imbedded in the motor and line was the skeletal fossil of a giant fierce tiger. I woke up and the worrying studdered. Through a dream the house told me it was plenty strong in spirit. Dreams are unimaginably blunt force instruments of imagery and physics gone awry, cherry picking from the waking time we fools ignore.

Some dreams need translation
~ I am born a renaissance hieroglyphic, a stickman of the court, from a muted tapestry, ordered pulled out by the barest thread before the king and his falconer. I smile with a ruby thread and step forward from the wall hanging with a thread of blue and green legs. My shirt with white ruffles deceives the eye with yellow highlights and umber shadows. I don't breath or talk, I just be, thats all there is in the 2 dimension. "Run!" says the king. And to the falconer he says "chase!" Tthrough a flashing grid of harsh angles I run to fields of crops deep in the kingdom. Run again and I am in a forest. I stretched my farthest strand to the farthest point on the land and then I coil back. I make a monkey out of the 3 dimension pursuers moving so fast I return more often than not to where i began. I stop to make sense of the world, to see it only in lines, the veins in the leaves, the peasant's fences. I've become a thread so thin that I brush against nothing and leave no trail, I feel and fear only the wind. And that is how the falconer will catch me. So imperceptible is my flight that the falconer counts every leaf on every tree and every blade of grass, asking each "did the wind pass you by for someone else". I am losing, traveling the ever narrowing lines that sector the kingdom. Feeling the falconer behind me I hold still using my faded thread to catch the setting sun and hide from sight. I begin to pull myself apart down to the last stitch of precious silver thread. I craft a silver dagger from it and softly place it into a skin pore on the falconer's leg. Years will go by and one day I will wake up. I will put a magnifying glass to skin and see a silver dagger in my pore, resting on it's side, and know it to be an heirloom from the centuries gone by.

FEAR
~ When Frank Klein ask me to submit a painting for this show, with this theme, I accepted. I told him I had a painting I was afraid to start, afraid to finish, and afraid to show. I was not being cute. I had lost my girl friend, Mcgurrin, to cancer years back and when I attempted to come to terms with it through art, when the time seemed right, I failed. Until the dream.
Morse Code Translation of the Painting:
~After Mcgurrin died I found grieving to be unbearable. I hated it. It burdened my soul and sleep. One morning I dreamed Mcgurrin was lying on a couch in what appeared to be the hull of a dark empty freighter. I was on my knees in front of her with two enormous hounds between us. They were monsters dogs snaring and howling and lunging at me, circling the couch blocking Mcgurrin. They were hell terrible, drooling blood and spit and pulse puking on the floor. My heart was breaking and I was crying tears in to their slop. Mcgurrin just sat with a peaceful unconcerned look on her face. I bent over on all fours like a dog and began to mop up their poison with my long hair drenching myself in it and wailing. I woke up shaking, wondering how a dream, for that matter the universe, could be so cruel. I thought about the dream for days until the fear it gripped in me began to translate. Mcgurrin was on her journey and she wasn't worried or hurting anymore. These hellhounds were my anger and pain, something I was indulging in, soaking up like an impotent Samson. A burden she would no longer tolerate in me, a dream she offered up in extreme imagery to force the healing to begin.
I don’t consider this a successful painting, in the sense that it answers questions you start out with on a blank canvas. It is a raw moment in time stretched out passed it’s shelf life, told from a blue broken heart

MOK's suicide
~ In a valley of green cobras and small boys, a tall negro leaps from a taxi. Mok says "she" looks happy, maybe shes going to a reunion. I am looking at my reflection in a window, long hair and a beard stubble. I listen intently to mok and say, she's a guy silly. Mok, Maureen and I are getting our plane tickets on a tarmac from 2 asian girls in a coolaid stand, 50's stewardess hats and skirts. We take our sits by the window in a plane that never took off, it came into existence flying, been flying for years and dying from stress and metal fatigue, it's roaring bleeding oil, we feel it's fuel boiling. From our seats we can see past the pilots, transparent pilots also dying from strain, wind and age. The plane is only a few feet from ground flying through a suspension bridge with the wings tips inches from clipping the arches on both sides. We are insane with fear watching the bridge and road rushing toward us. A pilot dies as we pass the bridge. The wings begin breaking apart severing trees and mailboxes along a country road. We watch as the plane cuts one last mailbox then spins and crash. Suddenly Mok is running ahead of Maureen and me to a fishing pond. 2 new asian women in a bait shop give mok a twisted up complicate syringe. Maureen is crying out and Mok jabs his palm. I can feel the poison from the distance enter his heart. He throws the syringe in the fish pond and I dive in find it. The water's cold clear with train tracks on it's bed. The syringe is leaking purple ink. I wake wondering why mok killed himself.

Dream begins. An older sister I never had stands in front of aluminum factory building. She is clad in leather telling me this industry is mine by birthright. She beckons me inside to learn the ropes. The work floor is dizzying stretching out of sight at a 70 degree incline, a looming wood hill impossible to climb. Massive work engines are smashed into the floor, steadily inching up the hill like prairie dogs, spilling out the splintered wood like overstuffed mail. I think I see men riding them. I have no idea how i am to run this factory. She waves me on through a door leading to an outside garden party. It is full of gentleman and children, grass and trees, food tables and swings. A buck-naked mok runs through the party hooting and cackling his way up to a giant loaf of baked bread. Resting like a school bus peacefully in the grass. Mok plunges his arms into it's end and pulls out two feet and ankles. Laughing and pulling he produces more leg and then with another pull a butt-naked girl that plops on the ground. Grabbing her hands mok lifts her upright and brushes off some bread crumbs. The two begin to cackle and run naked and free pass the party hooting out of sight. I wake up now.

Before Cities
~ part 1 of dream
Before cities, before hunted herds, before time's movement, above a stream on a green hill I watch. The midday sky catches the shoulders of a clan of Korean women. Standing and kneeling their casual line mirrors the bank. I join them. I am as quiet as them. Between each of us and the river stand small saplings, slung in their tiny forked branches are working silkworms, one for each of us. We are mulling over their preparation, waiting for evening and the worms to complete a small silk blanket for us to rest our heads on. A peaceable wind, hinting of time's birth blows the finished silks off the saplings. We each collect one. One of the girls holds my hand and we begin to climb the hills in search of a perfect cliff ledge. One to sleep on for a 100,000 years, safe and undisturbed through ice ages and evolution. We look out at the panorama one last time and see that the others have done the same. She and I place our heads together on the silk and sleep. I awake alone, she did not make it. I vomit metal fillings and blood, all that remains of her and the silk. I know I have slept to long, pass the 100,000 years.
~ part 2 of dream
I am on a stone balcony. I lean out and look a mile down and then a mile up at utter machinery and endless lit balconies. It is a perpetual night city, electrified, where families rarely leave the balconies they were born on. Behind me is this balcony's birth family. The moment one is born here a hovering tablet, sparking thin, chest high accompanies you like a humming bird through life. It is a electronic game, a coded, vibrating mosaic of neon chicklets embedded with the DNA of your desires. A hypnotic live cross section of your life that constantly reveals the patterns of your thoughts and body functions at any given moment. The chicklets spark and fade, mathematically dancing as you hedge your life, manipulating desired outcomes on the screen. it is all that people do anymore. I peer up the city and I see a gigantic floating tablet many stories high, the fruit of the most avarice merging their tablets with the liked minded, boosting the chance of a worthwhile moment. This family is small and poor, lost in the dread of the flickering that has replaced life. ~ I wake up.