Having spent my recent years becoming a digital artist, I was inspired to return to my roots in drawing and painting after seeing the marble mountains above Cararra, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and La Primavera in Florence’s Uffizi, Michelangelo’s Captives and the David, as well as the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
After returning to California from Italy, I decided to create an online journal which would continue my 30 year practice of remembering and recording my dreams, while also serving as a conduit or bridge over which I might pass as I reawaken my relationship with my traditional training. In my attempt to convey the feeling of crossing over a kind of twilight threshold between the worlds, I recalled my earliest studio days, when I made a silk screen print entitled “Dream Departure.” Here is a photo of that print:
Looking for my new studio situation, I find myself in a promising area. It seems to be a small area of old warehouses and industrial spaces near the sea or bay shore. I am in a little lobby reading a rather cheerful notice posted by the manager of some nearby spaces. She is advertising different services, such as wake up calls, tea, breakfast or lunch, personal attention, and so forth, almost like a house mother, or wife/girlfriend for rent.
The whole area has a feeling of open space, peace, light and creative potential. I am thinking I’ll go out and look at a few different situations when the woman herself appears. In person, she is bountifully sweet, very soft, feminine and friendly, with an attractive combination of instinctive nurturing compassion and playful availability. She says to me in her sparkling way that if I don’t rent one of her spaces, I won’t get her services along with the deal.
Exploring a series of abandoned spaces, windowless rooms under a big old building, I suddenly enter a room which looks at first glance as if it is covered in graffiti, as if perhaps bums or transients have been living there. A second look quickly reveals the fine quality of the work and immaculate condition of the place. It is a work of art of a kind never seen before. What appears to be furniture is actually the imitation of furniture, quite surreal in its distortions and omissions, with similarly mocked-up and distorted objects on the shelves and surfaces. The walls are completely painted in a subtly hallucinogenic vision that looks at first glance like a simple room in warm tones, but upon further inspection reveals a wealth of meandering and chaotic distractions, as if painted by a group of talented pot heads. The overall impression is so thorough and meticulous, yet so shocking and surreal, that I can only conclude that I have stumbled upon a masterwork.
Excited, I call my companions to come and see what I have found. I am exclaiming about my observations and conjecturing about how these rooms, for there are two of them side by side, could have come into existence. Clearly this is original art of the highest quality, but were its makers aware that they were making art, or just accumulating deranged gestures?
The question is answered when the artist shows up. He is a large and powerful bohemian-looking man of middle age, with bushy black hair and beard. He has been working on these rooms for a very long time, and answers affirmatively when I ask him if he realizes he has made a work of art like nothing ever seen before. He is very artistically aware of his accomplishment, and very serious about it.