During my freshman year of college I experienced a baptism-by-fire radical assault on my dearest beliefs and assumptions about reality.  It all began in my art school foundation design program.  I entered the program in 1970 on the heels of twelve years of Catholic School education and the Sixties; and I quickly learned the meaning of the words, “they don’t call it Liberal Arts for nothing!”  

A fine arts education is meant to open up your mind to new ways of seeing the world; I was not disappointed.  In addition to our studio classes we studied the full gamut of art history from the Lascaux cave paintings to the Italian Renaissance, and right through early modernism and Pop Art. In foundation design we were introduced to the Surrealist artists and writers.  I was impressed with their willingness to explore the irrational parts of the mind, in their search for inspiration for their art.  I found the work of Magritte and Delvaux, who both worked with dream imagery, to be particularly fascinating.  Disgusted with the political and social status-quo of Post World War One Europe, the Surrealists recognized Freud’s idea of the subconscious mind as an oracle of unmet desires and repressed emotions as the perfect metaphor for the social turbulence of the day.  They set out creating a radical new art, abolishing the academic aesthetic hierarchy in favor of new styles reflective of the changing political and social dynamics of modern European society.

 

Inspired by the Surrealists’ radical approach to art, I began experimenting with different techniques to express a seemingly endless stream of imagery that came to me in a spontaneous, effortless fashion.  In addition to long hours spent in the studio, painting, I also delved into analytic philosophy, existentialist philosophy, poetry, American literature, and art history.   Excited by this frenzy of new ideas, I searched for a common thread to tie all that I was learning into a cohesive statement.

 

For many young artists in the nineteen seventies, the themes of the Surrealists, Existentialists, and early Modernists still resonated; we identified with the Surrealists, and like them, felt the part of misfit and outcast. Uncertain of our role in society, we felt isolated and marginalized from the mainstream.  Like a singer without a song or an actor without a script, we weren’t sure who our audience was, or what our subject matter was supposed to be.  In earlier times, artists were supported with commissions to paint portraits of the monarchs and nobles or to decorate palaces and churches with illustrations of Biblical stories and historical narratives.  Their task was clear:  follow the assignment and express it with clarity.  Unfortunately for many of us contemporary artists, the answer to the question, “for whom are we painting?” is, “ourselves.”

 

For me, the conundrum was: Can I make paintings for myself that also have some meaning for others?  Is self-expression alone a worthy reason to dedicate my life to making art?  I decided that recording my personal narratives is a worthy endeavor because my personal story, if well told, would bear witness to the time we live in.  To ensure that my narrative is relevant to others I tasked myself to identify and develop themes that resonate emotionally with others.

 

Through my somewhat arbitrary and unsystematic reading of twentieth century philosophy I learned that the existentialists investigated emotional, political, and subjective experience while the analytic philosophers investigated logic, mathematical reasoning, and objective thinking.  I was equally attracted to both, and used ideas from both in formulating my art work.  My content was emotional but the structure I used to present it was logical.

 

From the get-go I was attracted to drawing and painting.  What I love about drawing and painting is the challenge of expressing the three dimensional world in two dimensional space. Using a shorthand language of shapes, line, and color, we can create both dead flat abstraction and full Illusionistic space.  The picture plane is a philosophical gateway into an artificial, imaginary world, which exists in its own time and space regardless of what the artist is depicting on it.  This fact makes painting a complex abstract language with many variables and eccentric features.  This language has an inherent philosophical nature – the artist asks “What is reality?” and the painting responds, “Show me!”  For me, looking at a painting unleashes a line of Socratic questioning, an unpeeling of layers and layers of implied meaning and assumptions which sometimes turn out to be false signs and mere illusions created by our minds in our desire to quell the uncertainty that we face each day of our lives.  In some cases the more we look at a painting the less certain we become of what it is we are seeing.  Our emotional capacity to process metaphor and allegory is fed by our desire to interpret and understand the world we live in.  Painting is an inquiry into reality. We discover reality through our individual experiences of the world.

 

Every generation has it defining crisis; the Surrealists had World War One; we had the Vietnam War.  As the anti war movement grew and society became more polarized, I felt my creative impulses build.  The resulting conflict and anxiety formed the spark for my artistic yearning.  I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, but I knew I had to do something.  I could feel the pressure building inside.

 

What with all this uncertainty and the angst of being at the crossroads of the end of my childhood and the onset of adulthood, is it any wonder that at the ripe old age of eighteen anxiety seemed to be the overriding theme of my life?  I now had at my disposal the language of painting to express and possibly exorcise this anxiety, but I still needed to find the right subject matter to carry this theme metaphorically.

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Not coincidentally, around this time I started having lucid dreams and nightmares.  Many of these dreams woke me in a state of panic.  Covered in sweat, I could recall every detail.  Many of these dreams appeared repeatedly, knocking me over the head with messages that my cognitive faculties could not comprehend.  I began to record these dreams in my sketchbooks.  In searching for ways to express the incredible anxiety they caused me to feel, I developed the idea to depict them as narratives running through a malleable space – a space/time continuum which does not conform to the laws of perspective.  I was interested in the feeling that the dreams produced in me, not in their “meanings.”  Conventional realism seemed too limited to express the anxiety and terror that characterized my dreams.  I sought a style that could better express their irrational absurdity.  My brain, recently scorched by the fire and brimstone of foundation design, conceptual art theory, and the general gestalt of the art school experience, was game for something new.  Rapid fire exposure to Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Pop Art had me spinning.

 

The fleeting nature of memory required I work as directly as possible.  I drew the dream imagery quickly without thoughts of how it looked artistically.  I relied on my internal recognition mechanism to verify the fidelity of the drawings to the source material.  I realized I was skating on thin ice, as there was no way anyone else could verify that the imagery was accurately expressing those particular dreams.  Notwithstanding, I held my ground on the philosophical point that what the viewer sees is not the dream but the language used to express it.  That language, grounded in the history of art making, belongs not to me, but to all of the humanity.  Confident that this common thread was enough to justify my obsession with this personal subject matter, I set about expressing my idea, borrowing freely and quoting liberally from the symbols and techniques of the history of art.

 

Although dream imagery comprises only about ten percent of my entire oeuvre, the techniques I developed to express these notoriously temporal impressions continue to structure most of my other narrative work.  What I discovered in dream imagery was a pre-selected system of hierarchical imagery arranged in an absurdly gripping narrative, where certain details are magnified for reasons not always clear.  As mentioned above, conventional realism seemed too static, too familiar, and too comfortable to accurately express the violent random changes of mood that can occur in a dream.  Realism relies on illusionism to draw the viewer into the pictorial space; I want the viewer to experience the disjointedness of the dream sequence itself.  By substituting the system of spatial perspective and vanishing points used in realism with a codified hierarchical system based on the apparent symbolic value of the imagery, I followed what seemed to me to be the logic of the dream narrative itself.  

 

Loaded with potential symbolism and metaphor, dream-based narratives present as powerful psychological allegories.  The interpretation of these narratives I leave to others; my role as an artist is simply to record and document them.  My attraction to dream imagery springs from the directness images projects their apparent importance in the narrative.  Their structure provides me with a specific subject matter, unique to my personal emotional make-up.  

 

What I learned from studying dream imagery is that mining the richest symbolic content of any scene provides a powerful material with which to construct a painting.  This idea carried over to my other work as well.  I try to distill all of my subject matter down to its salient symbolic features.  Much of my nondream based subject matter derives from memories, memories which continuously distort and change with the passing of time.  This fact alone causes me a certain anxiety.  I know I am guilty of embellishing and revising the facts more and more as time go on, idealizing the facts, turning them to fiction.  Had I stuck with traditional still life painting instead, the silent and immutable still life objects might have provided me with the stability I have been grasping for in the shadowy world where from my work emerges.  On the other hand, when I look at the still life paintings of Cezanne and Picasso, I am not sure the outside world, when carefully scrutinized, appears any more cohesive than the dream world.

 

Another thing I noticed is that the process of dreaming, where we surrender our analytical faculties to our subconscious mind, is similar to the trance-like state we go into when we lose ourselves in our creative work.  Senses heightened, perception on high alert, our intuition takes over.  We lose all track of time, giving ourselves over to the moment.  Being lost in this nonverbal, right-brain experience creates an intensely pleasurable feeling.  We sense the spatial nuances in front of us and express them freely. When “in the zone” our creativity unfolds effortlessly like any natural process, such as walking or breathing, unencumbered by verbiage and rhetoric.

 

In ancient times dreams were thought to be messages from the gods, omens or oracles to enlightenment.  Who among us has not been struck by the story of Exodus of Pharaoh’s dream of the seven fat cows getting swallowed up by the seven thin cows?  Joseph, the hero of the story, has the gift of interpreting dreams, and becomes an advisor to Pharaoh.  In another Biblical story, Jacob dreams of angels ascending a ladder to heaven.  Stories like these create the desire to find meaning in our own dreams, and set us up for the endless tomes of pseudoscientific drivel on the subject of dream interpretation.  Indeed, the investigation into dream interpretation comprises a major part of Freud’s psychological theories.  Finding allegorical meaning in our literature is a full-time occupation for many scholars.  When these interpretations resonate with the public, we edify and transform them into cultural touchstones.