Artist statement for painting exhibit at Swanson Contemporary Gallery
Painting is like poetry, an attempt to say what cannot be said.
I wish to communicate moments of fluidity between this world and the world of dreams. I want to share the sense of confirmation that happens when a dream steps right through the daytime door.
In my dream I had forgotten all about the dream world. I was going about my day checking things off a list. The next thing on my list was to carry this shallow cardboard box filled with six small gray birds lying on their sides, and place them in the trunk of my car. As I was about to close the trunk, the dream voice said: Wake the sleeping birds!
I woke up with a sense of urgency about how to go about this. I researched 5,000 year old images from Egypt, birds on fragments of clay, writing on tomb walls. I developed my own hieroglyphic alphabet, each symbol standing for both an object and a sound.
Always, unbidden things happen, the door between the worlds opening. In working with these images from dreamtime, they become part of my waking world.
This Work
My friend, the poet, asked me what I was doing. I said, you know, the visual form of mumbling, the verbal version of stumbling. Leaving my hands to their own devices, closing my eyes, transforming vices into color and verse. Saying this work is my prayer.
L Doctor April, 2012