Love Me Red

The tides of dreams are capricious, and sometimes its just a steady run of the usual odd sea life. But the currents change and deep creatures come out to play in my brain surf. This painting was done as a reward to myself for Vanishing, which took almost a year to finish. It was done from life and slap dashed its painterly way to a complete image in two weeks. Oh, delightful dessert of a picture, antidote to those mares in the sea bedeviling the wetwork.

Aqua de Dios

Finally all together--- the woman and the catspiders (& 3 fish). The place is an actual place in La Jolla, California. If you swim out from the cove's small, sandy beach you will find these fields of undulating green weeds atop dark, fissured rocks. Down among the green and shadowy cracks are brilliant golden-orange fish. This is an image that I carried around in my head for decades until I knew how to use it and how to paint it.
Often this is the way my images grow: an actual vision is mated with an internal or dreamt one. Occasionally it is something that someone has said. Ladle of Blood/Heart of Wings began as a friend's description of an autopsy-he told me that they ladled the blood out of the abdomen.



Vanishing began as another friend's description of a fight in a topless joint. In that case I actually visited the place and did a couple of quick drawings-before the owner came over and told me I was upsetting the girls.