An automatic painting. Tranced out, I identified with both figures. But it beats me why I (as the girl on the left) was so outraged about the gift of a perfectly nice levitating flower. And as her animal familiar (on the right) I thought she'd like it... Nope.

I felt so hurt and sorry for myself (whichever self I was) that I had to add the soul of Elvis behind us, conducting Heartbreak Hotel as background music... poor, poor me!

I found the image rather puzzling at the time... but I spent the ensuing year freaking out from (un)buried memories of abuse. Now I think the flower may stand for those memories--and the picture, painted mostly from instinct not logic, may have been warning me I was less ready than I thought to handle the gift of old pain my body had carried so long.

A NOTE FOR ARTISTS

Click on the image above, if your web connection's fast. I want you to see the original file--a huge GIF (458K), not a JPG like most Web art. The difference in formats partly explains its sharpness and strange textures--the smaller JPG version above inevitably blurs things.

But it doesn't fully explain them. This was my first painting on a new computer, reveling in the extra colors (256 seemed infinite after 16!) and all that elbow-RAM. Like most of my digital paintings from that time, it's NOT done in Photoshop but a program called Deluxepaint. You can paint from scratch in Photoshop but I think it channels you toward, well, Photoshoppy effects. Serious artists should use at least one other program that feels very different, or the software may subtly limit your art by making certain effects tedious and others too damn easy... Sorry, didn't mean to preach! But it's true. Photoshop is a velvet cage cushioning you from raw reality... rather like suburbia, or the Demoblican Party.

A NOTE FOR DREAMERS, ON THE... CREATURE

She's a recurring figure in my dreams; her name's Silky. She often appears as a black cat, a horse, or this species, a highly intelligent being called a krelkin.

Elvis, to my eternal embarrassment, also recurs in my dreams, though (thank the gods of Memphis) not nearly as often. Since he's usually the fat Elvis.

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