INTRODUCTION

In March I had a sore back and shoulder from too much digital work. I needed to get away from the computer. I got out my paints. Hadn't touched them much during the pandemic.

I usually know what I'm aiming for--to illustrate a dream. Yet I like cartoonist Lynda Barry's later books on art, inhibition and improv: One! Hundred! Demons!, Picture This, Making Comics and Syllabus. She's obsessed with freeing the inner kid who drew without judging, knowing, planning--she's close to the Surrealist ideal of automatic drawing. While I find Barry's page compositions boxy & too cramped for me, I like the intensity and strangeness of her figures and their blunt honesty--she refuses to censor, and most artists lack the guts--once they grow up, that is. But Barry's up there with R. Crumb.

So in mid-March, inspired by her exercises, I decided to experiment with improv. For my birthday I'd been given two books with black pages, one small, one large. I tackled this small one first. I decided to paint improv and see what came out. My only rules:

1. Draw or paint--no borrowed images like photos.
2. If I dislike a page, just keep painting til I DO like it. Leave it in! No discards.
3. No need to fill the page like Barry. Let it breathe!

The black-page book was horizontal, 5x7" (about 12x17 cm), with a spiral binding of heavy copper wire. So each pair of pages (after the cover) formed a potential unit, though I never ran images across the edges, as the spiral binding made a prominent barrier. That's missing here on screen, but colors and patterns did sometimes cross, so I've shown them in facing pairs, except the covers.

I didn't plan to paint a narrative, let alone a piece about shamanic dreamwork, let alone one narrated by my anima Silky, let alone one where she sings Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien". But that's what came out.

Oddest of all: I thought of this piece as unique, but as I wrote up these notes, I started to recall similar art experiments. Seems like once or twice a decade, I try improv, scare myself with what floods out, put it away, forget I did it... and a few years later, do it all again.

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