"Organic - 08/2005"

"Organic - 08/2005", hmmm, where to start.

Have you ever been on the verge of falling asleep and had a series of flashes of faces and events from your day. Sometimes you might have a flash of something unrelated. That is where “Organic - 08/2005” finds its roots.

I try to keep a pencil and a sketchbook near the bed or in my living room to jot down rough sketches of interesting things or ideas that might arise from my dream state. If you don’t do the sketch right away you will probably loose the image by morning.

During my waking hours the sketches from my thoughts are often driven toward geometric designs, but my dream images tend to be far less harsh more organic in nature.

Truthfully, I don’t know what in my subconscious prompted this image, which actually played out like a little movie for a brief instant. In the frame was my happy group of spiky balls just drifting along in this dark stream with nebulae like formations in the background. Then the dark tendrils entered from the left side to ensnare the little spiky balls. What happened after that, can’t say. That’s when I pulled myself out of light sleep and started sketching before the memory faded.

Fortunately with the sketch I am able to access that memory well enough to create a painting. This kind of painting pretty much paints itself. It requires little pencil sketching on the watercolor paper once you have worked out what is going to happen in the painting and you determine what depth certain elements are in relation to one another.

One nice thing about “Organic - 08/2005” is that you can hang the picture in any direction given that there is no solid frame of reference for up, down, left, or right.