Acrylic On Canvas: Reine Dreams, Summer of 1999

This is an interesting painting...

During the summer of 1999, I stayed up late on these disturbingly hot summer nights without A/C, potentially expanding my brain, physically speaking, as it swelled in the heat and I drove myself insane, desparately trying to reach something transcendental with my artwork. It was during this time that this painting emerged. It meant to symbolize everything in my head and create balance from it. Everything in the painting is either symbolic of something or based on a visual image that was in my head. I never knew *exactly* what I was painting, but that I was supposed to paint it. It was during the peek of the period in my life where I was convinced all my artwork had to come from divine sources, and it may very well have. The only thing in the painting that was modeled from an outside source are the flowers in the foreground. Panicking in the middle of the night that this painting was going nowhere, I created this vase, urn if you will, and decided I wanted to put something beautiful in it. Awakening, hopeful, as clean as spring and morning light, the Easter Lilies were found in the 1969 World Book encyclopedia I kept in my house, I believe under the "flower" section... And they seem to go perfectly.

I have no idea where the rest of the images come from, but I have always felt such deep connectedness to this painting for at very least the experience I went through creating it. Years later I once saw a scene where there was an actual photograph of a cat, framed just like the image I thought I had "created" here. Was this a very real thing from the past? Did we have such a cat image in a past life? I have no idea. All I know is, I never knew such a thing was real when I painted this, but I knew it had to be painted. The irony of the framed cat was too much. The irony that the cat is more asture and aware than the people associated with the painting was so, so right.

It was a common symbol at the time in both my artwork and poetry that cats are more aware of certain things than people. There is a certain obsession I have with cats that is usually in recession, but which will never be relinquished. There is something about cats that I feel has a true connection to myself and my soulmates and certain paths we took in life.

I could talk about the other symbolism, but I would go on forever...

The fact of the matter is, I am wholly certain [although there is irony in this sentance in saying that] that the conscious mind makes far more mistakes than our subconscious mind ever does. When you can't figure out what the answers are or what you are supposed to do, or what any balance in life is, the best thing to do is usually not try to over think it, but relax, and let it come to you... I tried to do that with this painting. I tried to make this truly from the unconscious, as free-associative as a painting could be. And, somehow planned by my conscious reasoning.