As Red Emma said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution..."
Weird paintings cover a hill town in Africa, demanding I paint them when I wake. Paintings on courage, flight... and defying tradition.
Writer Alice Miller tried painting her childhood monsters. I tried it her way and got a surprise message...
What makes so much animation all feel the same? Temptations inherent in the medium...
After reading Jung's dreams, I have a counter-Jungian dream. So different from his! And mine has some pointed advice...
CAUTION: NUDE STATUES
Why this site? Because if I'm around when you see my dream art, I feel like THIS......
A jaundiced dream of an art show that spelled out just how deeply I reject the rules behind modern art...
My figure-painting class here in San Francisco has a diverse student body, but not THIS diverse...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Why's Jade the bitter artist throw me at her happier, calmer daughter? Wait, is Jamie the new ME?
CAUTION: SEX
So exactly how is posting all these dreams different from crawling naked inside your screen?.
CAUTION: NUDITY
I was supposed to be studying perspective but I went beyond the box...
Bradbury's Mars was based on his life in Venice, California. What worlds grow out of my San Francisco?
Malevolent artwork terrorizes my baby and me! What's to be done?...
I dreamed this was in our civic museum: a painting of the central dynamo of our world finally erupting...
Decision by decision, we made our way down immense rock crags. Below, I had to put out a deadly fire, a fire as solid as wood or stone, with a white staff. What am I really trying to calm?
Coyote invades an abstract painting and reveals why the art biz likes conceptual, impersonal art...
Is digital Web blather any better than old-fashioned, live, analog blather?
CAUTION: STUPIDITY
Cartoonist Robert Crumb doesn't aim at taboos--he stalks his own feelings, ignoring rules! A learnable technique...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
"I've always dreamed other lives. Other bodies. Other times. Other worlds. I draw my lives..."
Artists have their own strange culture, and we can unintentionally mislead therapists unfamiliar with us...
CAUTION: THERAPESE
I signed a prenatal agreement for weird, uneven luck to turn my life toward art and spirit. I want to broaden it, but I've lost the contract! So my spirit wife Silky sets out to find it...
My spirit-wife and I spend our last evening together painting. Not with colors--with emotions...
Rather than draw the model, I often sketch my classmates in life-drawing. They get so intent!
A model who created absurd, impossible poses, and held them heroically...
CAUTION: SILLY NUDITY
An elegant, sexy classmate of mine, a fastidious feline island in our sea of grubby manic sketchers...
We see patterns everywhere... but that also means we relegate nonpatterns to the background...
In life drawing class, the model built a sort of green island/nest in the sea of grubby students...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
I always thought I saw differently than others, but when someone builds the Goggles...
Flying unicorns hang out with me and my friends, sending us dreams full of useful advice--and more concrete gifts...
The terror of Navy breakfast, the joy of filterfeeding, how to marry pudding, and a sniper lunch with kisses...
For two years, I sat at the desk in our co-op gallery, and secretly sketched our bewildered, art-assaulted customers...
As the bland lead the blind... who knows their own mind? I'll tell you who....
A portrait of my dream-friend Silky, using a technique learned from artist Camille Porter.
When your brain-cops are edgy, you're getting warm!
I was a sheltered girl till I entered my family's secret ancestral vault. I didn't expect to meet...
A Himalayan peak boils with warring creatures, but a guru says "They're just your conflicts. Sit, watch..."
Klimt did a deep portrait of a lesbian couple back when most folks hardly saw gays as human...
I'm cartoonist Marjane Satrapi. I passively tag along with friends (and a fiance I tend to forget) in the Mission District of San Francisco. But they blunder into real trouble...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
An early piece about Matisse, and his models, and quilting, and disembodied heads...
Two child artists mail themselves to me in their paint kit, and start a painting orgy that gets messy...
CAUTION: PEDOPHILIA, OR MAYBE PEDOPHOBIA
I'm scared to show my dream-paintings to my art class. That night I find an large otter in my bed...
CAUTION: SEX
My art teacher said "Draw a spiritual experience." I did, but that night, I dreamed of sharp-toothed...
CAUTION: TOPLESS MEDITATION.
Monet is over 100 now, living in an art colony. I visit him, but my parents come along. Bad idea...
My friend the Polygamous Pilot is up in an ice-storm, hanging powerlines on the sky, when...
I get sick from figure-sketching. Guilt? Pray to my dream-gods, and find I'm at a weird wedding--as the bride!
In a church-tent, I find glowing pictures of mine I've never seen awake. One's half-done; I work on it.
I wake, and read how Jung, in a Ravenna church, saw luminous images he later learned burned centuries ago!
CAUTION: NUDE STAINED GLASS
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
Reactionaries smash a paper. To rebuild, the editor must sell tiki carvings! But gods don't LIKE being sold...
CAUTION: MORAL QUANDARY
I'm a kid in a classroom someone's trashed. Our teacher goes ballistic. But was the gypsy girl framed?
I dream I'm an otter, and wake into a dream about sculpture--and learn my style's due to my species...
Through twin gates of dream -- Dream-castles on the sea, lovely and lame -- A surfer of the San Andreas Fault
The knight of creative fire, who takes over when you've mastered technique but kept your passion...
I dream I'm giving a friend a Tarot reading, and the card she picks for herself is one I've never seen:
Teresa mistrusts men. Her best friend Sabina comes on to me in front of Teresa, who blames me...
CAUTION: NUDITY, BETRAYAL, GENDER PARANOIA
An artist I know dismisses her (gorgeous) art as just therapy... while the museums are full of trash. Why?
I was a mermaid trying to find Count Coyote's stolen dreams, so I could marry my human girlfriend...
CAUTION: GAY MARRIAGE, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
Alchemy demands I kill ten swallows. I refuse! Instead, twelve birds and I fuse and fly over a magic wood...
An improvised painting-series exploring my obsession for Utopia--and your deafening silence...
CAUTION: IDEAS, FURRY NUDITY, THAT GOSH-DARN MODERN ABSTRACT ART
I'm lost in a valley where unicorns love cyborgs but fear giant ants, who adore unicorns but hate cyborgs, who think ants are cute, but dread unicorns! And while the Three Tribes love and hate, cave-monsters sculpt them all. I set up peace talks between these four vertices of my tetrahedral soul, but what if I get what I want? Peace, love... transformation? What if those aren't cute and New Age?
CAUTION: SWEARING, DRUNK LIONS, CYBORG SURGERY, AND GOGGLE-BARFING
In our cult, we lie in vats of goo till we grow wings. But we're feared more than we knew...
CAUTION: A SPECIST LYNCH MOB, NAKED IN SCHOOL, LESBIAN FEELINGS, OBSCENE CARROT
These sketches bare my work process: I multitask, but without planning, in a flow state. I really do “follow my bliss”!
In cave times, while the men were out hunting, it was the women who learned to paint the cave walls to summon...
I'm a hardboiled detective wincing as I grill a meek little psychic (who might just be me) about embarrassing subjects like unicorns, and love...
CAUTION: A UNICORN WHO MAKES EVEN THE COPS BLUSH
An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW--no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!
Cartoony self-portrait as I paint with Persephone's pomegranate paintbrush. A mock woodblock print...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
I see great towers rising into a fog zone--or is it another universe, with different rules? How do you draw both worlds?
A writer's found in his office mating with an ash-covered creature! But could she be his muse?
CAUTION: NUDITY OR NOT? SEX OR NOT? NO ONE QUITE KNOWS...
Most writers search for their unique style. Not me--I struggle to convey unique EXPERIENCES...