I finally repaired my painting, Dream Time. I’d lost a couple of the Scrabble pieces because I had it leaning against the kitchen door for the longest time and one or both of the cats must have knocked them off. My sister found the exact letters I needed at the flea market and gave them to me for Christmas. Best gift ever. Because I think that this painting is one of my favorites and now I can share it with you.
This was the first piece in the Dream Time series. I stretched all the canvases myself with a thicker canvas, added collage items – coasters from Empire Brewing Co. and playing cards, and then I gessoed the canvases, added Martha Stewart latex paint in Milk White, and painted them with oil paint. There was this routine that gave all the paintings harmony, as well as devices like drawing in pencil, but I used a different color scheme in each one. This one is my favorite because I am in love with its buttery color and how effortless it felt to create it. It was seriously like a dream the way it all came together.
My favorite paintings are often the first in a series, I guess. I never noticed that before.
I keep the above painting in my bedroom and probably will never sell it because it is actually a narrative of one of the last times I returned to Ft. Lauderdale, FL after living there for two years. The rest of the Pompano Revisited series were variations on the theme – the puzzle piece layout, the shark, the Goodyear blimp; but none carry the same emotion for me as this one does. And there’s that light Naples yellow again.
You haven’t seen the next two paintings yet. A few years ago, I took the Talisman series to John Dowling, a professional photographer in the area. http://john-dowling.com/
He photographed them for me. That’s why I posted them to Shopify – because they are the best photos I have. But I’ve changed these two since the photo shoot.
In the above painting, I painted the little man figure with the black chalkboard paint. It was white in the Dowling photo. I changed the ribbon in Secret. I keep them both in my bedroom too. In my defense, there are a lot of walls in my house, all plaster and in need of something to cover their blemishes and cracks.
I also have a dreamcatcher, which may actually work because I’ve only had one nightmare since moving here nine years ago and when I woke up after it, I noticed the thing had fallen off its hook and landed behind the lingerie chest. Not to be superstitious or anything….
I have been having the most vivid dreams lately. Not sure why but they are the kind with a plot, like the entire seasons of Dallas and Knot’s Landing when it turned out that Pamela had dreamed the whole thing.
(Does anyone remember that Valene Ewing named one of her twins Bobby because he was dead?)
It’s funny because as viewers we need to accept the premise and then we’re fine with whatever the outcome. It’s all entertainment. That’s how I feel about Star Trek. You just accept that they are able to go to warp drive, accept that they can transport by vanishing and reassembling their molecules elsewhere, accept that even though there are photon torpedoes and phasers set to stun and/or kill, in the end, Captain Kirk and the bad guy or Spock and the bad guy will come to fist-to-cuffs blows and Starfleet will always prevail. (I think you can tell I had a Star Trek movie marathon this weekend?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSq_UIuxba8
It seems easy enough to accept the premise of world peace, accept each other for who we are and what we bring to the artistic table (or any table) without having to sleep on it. But if lucid dreams are really a thing, I want to have a dream dinner with Gene Roddenberry, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Walt Disney. The ultimate dream team.
