We Slept in a Cave.

  “all the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams”

-Elias Canetti

No one had told me that sometimes falling asleep is the best way to start something really important.  In fact, I had always believed that sleepers were blind. That to close your eyes and ears off to the world was to commit socio-economic suicide. But we sleep to gain strength, to reflect on the things that keep us emotionally healthy, we sleep to be sure we can stand against the winds blowing in from tomorrow.

This year has been a considerate nightmare; considerate in its delivery of positive experiences and a nightmare because they happen to be my favourite type of dream. When we wake up screaming, sweating and disoriented in the dark, our minds become focused on one thing: illumination.  

The saddest thing about this dream is that it will always be fleeting and the lamplight will never reach every corner of my room. I know already that I will forever be trapped in twilight, never again to be engulfed by the same dream but never fully awake from it.  

And so my work this past four months has been lit by this twilight. I began trying to express the unrealities in a child’s perception of things, especially of unfortunate things, but have found even more unrealities in my own perception of things. If something is good, I yell at it, jump on it or pick it up because it's magic. Equally, if something is bad, it looms, personified as a winged thing. It would hope to destroy me, but that's why I picked up the magical good thing in the first place.

I would rather not kid myself or anyone else in saying my work is an exploration of the past anymore. The past has just happened to visit my present and let me play with it in the way I want to now, not then.

In the past, I was distressed, and so when the past came to the future I distressed it with steel wool. I no longer want my work to be inhibited by my “overwhelming intelligence and conceptual aptitude”. I want it to be reactionary and maybe a little emotional.

And I think I can illustrate this way…

VESTIGES....THE SHOW.

Check out the website at www.ocadfirenze.blogspot.com

Too many leaves.

"If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion."

-Ashleigh Brilliant

Bug Collection.
Acrylic on Masonite 19x22"

  After some experimentation with the memories of strangers, for my final few pieces in this body of work, I've decided to return to more familiar things. In the midst of all the paranormal excitement I found in the antique photos from the market near Sant Ambrogio, it completely slipped my mind that during my stay in Ireland, I was given a few antique photos of my own family.
  In the small stack of black and whites my father's sister gave me was an image I had never seen before this reunion; my father as a boy. His past has always been something of a mystery for us growing up, or maybe the little stories never trickled down the sibling ladder to reach me at the bottom. Either way, any childhood story about the man has always been a new one for me.
  I suppose the photo I was given gave me the opportunity to explore my perception of his experiences in a new way. Many of the conversations I've had with my father have been about his or another's journey into sobriety. This part of him is one of the only parts I know well. He has devoted most of his life to helping himself and others through the metamorphic change required to give up a substance, which is why I think he has such an affection for butterflies. 

If Only a Nightmare.

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.

-Marsha Norman

It Whispers.
Acrylic on masonite 19x22"

  Frequently around the studio I see polite inquisitions into how one of the artists' night went answered in a desperate tone leaking out of a defeated face with red, glazed eyes. Insomnia is an Artistically Transmitted Infection (ATI) easily contracted in a place where creative juices flow freely.

  Trying to fall asleep is often a futile activity for those that consciously tap into their sub-conscious each day. The main reason most artists sleep in most of the morning is because most of the night is spent with their eyes open in darkness, and then lamplight over a sketchbook, then back to darkness; rinsing and repeating, thinking and depositing.

  The problem I think may lie in the fact that when most people begin to visualize the impossible, their bodies surrender to fantasy for a rationed eight or so hours. But when any type of creative begins to see those familiar, intertwining, translucent blobs of colour, their body kick-starts and the cycle begins again. See, it's very hard to tell someone they're sleeping if they spend most of their day living in fantasy.

  But that moment when reality and dream cross over is always the ripest for harvesting inspiration. The only difficulty is that it is usually too late to get back to work (although you could argue it's never too late). Which is what I considered at 5am this morning, waiting to slip away. But I pulled through, slept on it and made a piece about those soft spoken moments before a dream.

Slap Me in the Face.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography. 

-Fredrico Fellini

Fixation.
Acrylic on masonite 19x22"

  For the first time, last week I could not bring myself to respect the work of someone prominent in the world of art. Or rather, was stunned at the fact that, whether distasteful, shocking or not, the work of this well known individual (whom I choose not to name as the foundation to his success is infamy) is widely considered to have artistic merit, if only to raise the question of what art really is.
  Truthfully, it wasn't the work itself that shocked me most, it was my reflection on my initial reaction to his work that came as a bigger surprise. Up until last week, I had been able to respect anything essentially artistic, even in a minute way. Without fail, I could find something worth my attention in a piece out of respect to the individual that, however mundane, had created something in his or her own image. But the work I was asked to look at and react to was pointlessly violent. It was created without satisfactory justification to the death it inflicted. So I painted about it without really thinking.
  I guess I've begun to welcome intuitive acts back into my work. The people in this studio have helped me unknowingly with that. For the first two years of my education in design, I had been taught to think, and not feel. I strove to make images that advertised my intelligence instead of my intuition. But most images are looked at intuitively by the viewer, so something created intuitively is like a reciprocal high five. No one wants to high five a formal handshake. A successful image should sting your face in a way that seems like masochism.