Dark-Sister-Dreaming (2002)
This was the last painting I completed while I was still living in New Orleans, in a year fraught with strange dreams and weird encounters. Within a “dark house” looking out onto a bright desert, one sees quasi-angelic figures hovering over the horizon, which is tinged green beneath them, like sunlight reflecting on the edge of the sea….
A troubled young man sits at the entrance of the dark house, close enough to step into the day but facing inward. Like many whom I met in New Orleans, he had been attracted by its glamour, but unable to find a safe mooring. The glowing slash on his chest, the heart-wound, comes from one of his stories about his life… love and betrayal.
One “dark sister” emerges in a silhouette of energy from the almond-like mandorla shape above the youth. The other is hard to see– she is in the lower right hand corner, sleeping, dreaming herself into being. The tide of her dreaming aura blends into the irregular shapes on the right side of the image, which contains faces and suggestive lines. They flow and disturb as substance in dreams can do….
Many interchanges between worlds are suggested here– in one way through the juxtaposition of three different mysterious spheres on the sands and in one of the portals that appears on the left side of the “dark house.” In that outlook, someone is fishing in a dark river of stars.
The topmost left visible portal is also hard to see– one silhouette offers a key to another in a starry nightscape. Both figures are almost obscured by mysterious auric tattoos– schematics that interpenetrate them.
(Go HERE to see more details of this work.)