Writer Alice Miller tried painting her childhood monsters. I tried it and got surprise messages...
CAUTION: FRANK LANGUAGE
Inspired by Lynda Barry, I fill a black-paged book with 20 improv paintings.
They grow into a tour of my dreamwork led my anima Silky, a nightmare...
Our writing class meets in this Victorian home. I turn off my filters and describe what I really see around me...
When I'm confused, this angel comforts me with this MORE confusing quote...
1991: dream of a weird tower like a cantileved skeletal sculpture of a coyote, in San Francisco. Sketch it then forget it.
1993: experimenting with a paint program, I make a peculiar image. No idea it's from a dream...
2020: transcribing old journals, I find the dream-sketches. My nondream experiment... wasn't.
Cartoonist Robert Crumb just turns off all taboos while drawing. A learnable technique...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, CARTOON SEX
How Bach sounded to me after seeing Fantasia...
If you can't tell what it is from the thumbnail, cheer up. It's indescribable full-size, too.
I always wrote some letters strangely--my 'd' was nearly illegible. So I set out to retrain my deep motor skills...
I tried to date a nice young butterfly but was stopped by a monster who was... my own wings?
CAUTION: UNDERAGE BUG
Painting an abstract watercolor, I drifted into trance, and found myself climbing a
thorny slope. Deer in the brush. Great peaks around. Had I gone wrong?
Night thoughts. Are they eggs? Dreams? Worlds? Phases of the moon?
CAUTION: NEGATIVE BREASTS
I turned off my conscious judgment and just drew. Two paths appeared--one led to
psychodrama, then parental prison; the other, into the underworld of dreamwork...
CAUTION: NUDE DREAM-SELVES
A series of family shadows, as I saw them then. These scenes are NOT literal, do I make myself clear?
But the tensions they show were very real...
CAUTION: GRIM! SEXUAL VIOLENCE, INCEST, MUTILATION
I've always loved curves, color, dreams, sex, texture... and planning, too.
So one day I drew 100 black boxes in ink--no color, no curves, no erasure! And then I began to seek...
I was cartooning with a headache. It took over and started drawing for me...
A poster playing with superimposed messsages. How strangely the mind sorts out different layers!
After I drew this I dreamed I was chasing stars with a long-tailed friend, and in the end we caught the Sun...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
When I see that grim museum shit I start giggling "Boy art!" The guards glare, so I go home and paint like this.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX TALK, LUST FAIRIES AND FLYING TEENY WEENIES
Improv-dancing with my sister, I get turned on. But then a repressed Asian girl joins our dance, and...
CAUTION: INCEST MENTIONED. OOPS, TOO LATE.
I had a headache and couldn't sleep. I started drawing, and asked for a cure. And a cartoon angel said...
CAUTION: TANTRUMS, MASTURBATION, JUNKFOOD, ANGELIC SCOLDING
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least till that visitor from Porlock barged in)
CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
Illness is such a handy excuse when you need solitude, care, rest, or just time to think... but...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
A mad experiment one night in Micrography, with a midnight rant for scripture and my girlfriend for God...
CAUTION: BLASPHEMY OF SOME KIND OR OTHER
I made a cold moon of burnished metal, rusted and scraped. But then this warm mare reared...
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
Why don't I push for more art shows? I asked how I feel at shows of my own work, and this came out...
Now the Evil Empire's dead. We're all safe, safe at last. And all the bombs are gone... right?
My dreams mix sex with warmth, grief, even silliness, but what's with the owls? Bewildering...
CAUTION: WEIRD ORGY
Two child artists mail themselves to me in their paint kit, and
start a painting orgy that gets messy in more ways than one...
CAUTION: PEDOPHILIA, OR MAYBE PEDOPHOBIA
I had fun playing fortuneteller, until David. My hands turned icy. I asked "Where are you going?"
Painted to that country song by Leonard Cohen, where Adam, Jesus, Washington, and FDR
all get interviewed in their darkest moments, and they all sing "We're only passin' thru..."
I always liked the little creatures in picture-poet Kenneth Patchen's wild collage-pages...
Hypnotized in therapy, I saw AT LEAST five competing goals tugging at me like gravity fields.
Naturally I drew them. Come tour the Inner Solar System of our desires...
CAUTION: NUDITY (BODY, HEART, BRAIN, SOUL)
Sexual beauty scares me--how I'm affected--how vulnerable I am. An irresistable pheromone...
CAUTION: SEXUAL THEME
A misty day in San Francisco's Presidio, where migrant pegasii graze on pine-tips and shadow witches nest...
I don't know what this scene is about--but it's not a dream. A stage, I think. Something from childhood.
CAUTION: BARE BEAR
Quail, spelunking again, finds ancient cave paintings of the Cult of the Fossil TV...
I just wanted to imagine getting licked by a nice friendly escapist dog on a nice shaggy rug, but...
CAUTION: BESTIALITY! SEX! METAPHYSICAL DOUBTS!
Think of your dreams as a rainforest, clearcut every morning--unless you make the effort to remember...
CAUTION: TINY NAKED ANGELS
Just a lazy, sexy image that came to me, of floating in air like a pinwheel, licking and being licked...
CAUTION: SEX
No dream, no plot. I saw myself as a horse grazing in a forest of giant mosses, lifting spore-packets...
Just a soft sketch of two dancers...then this loud slutty stomping woman leapt into the center...
WARNING: NUDITY.
I love curves, not the chunky forms of this machine-ruled world...
DREAM: I was a cheetah seeking a book of cheetah rolemodels, but this specist librarian harassed me...
PAINTING: months later, dream forgotten, I painted myself as an intellectual cheetah stretching...
No, not a guy with a tan. Yves Tanguy was a sailor who became a Surrealist.
When I was nine or ten, his work inspired me to try my first landscape drawings...
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
Asparagus, wings, an unhinged hand, a boxed ghost, butter, sister incest, tomato-pincushions,
secret volcanoes, one-eyed integers, chickenleg dresses, mirrors and bananapeel beds...
Nearly abstract but not quite. The snake, the quill pen, the secretary bird, and the rose.
In an idle moment I held a pencil and asked the air who'd win the Derby.
'Trigo' meant nothing to me, but was listed at 32 to 1, so...
Twenty-four panels of improvised comics in unerasable ink,
letting the shapes and themes in each panel suggest the next...
I twirled pinups into surreal not-quite-abstracts, to see just how twisted sex could get...
CAUTION: NAKED PRETZELS
Night. A London suburb. A UFO big as a city block looms over us. It's seen all over South England. Yet we go blank--
forget! Though not quite--for years after, Steve has recurring dreams. When he tells me one, I recall the same event...
CAUTION: INTENSE UFO EXPERIENCE
I try to make beauty, try to be beauty, but all the while, this voice keeps snickering...
An improvised painting-series exploring my obsession for Utopia--and your deafening silence...
CAUTION: IDEAS, FURRY NUDITY, THAT GOSH-DARN MODERN ABSTRACT ART
I wander a valley where unicorns love cyborgs but fear giant ants, who love unicorns but
fear cyborgs, who love ants but fear unicorns! And while the Three Tribes squabble, cave-monsters
sculpt them all. I set up peace talks between these four aspects of my tetrahedral soul...
CAUTION: SWEARING, DRUNK LIONS, CYBORG SURGERY, AND GOGGLE-BARFING
Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
My personality is borderline multiple: they veto and sabotage each other if not consulted first via dreams...
Maybe the web like a shining dove will lead me from my lonely cave
into the light. The glaring light... Wait! That can't be right!
CAUTION: SEPIA HALFTONE NUDITY
Seeking a mate? Mutual attraction and having much in common aren't enough--
it's equally vital to learn what you don't have in common...
An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW without preconceptions--
no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!
Here's an incantation to induce flying dreams. "Bring me wings NOW, or forever hold your peace..."
Drew all night in a trance and only learned at dawn what this flirting otter and wolf were trying to tell me...
CAUTION: NUDITY AND SEXUAL THEME
I often dream of words forming on a page as their images dance around me. Here's an example...
Another lie from those fiendish abstractionists. Turns out it's not a yellow ball at all...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...