I am a clinical social worker and psychotherapist practicing in Indianapolis. I create paintings recalled from dreams, meditations and shamanic journeys. This process provides insight for personal growth as well as artistic expression.
I began painting in 2002 in response to a dream. In the dream I am invited to a family’s home for dinner. After dinner the host says that we are going to paint. I tell him that I do not know how to paint, but he doesn’t seem to care. He gets out canvases, brushes and paints and we start painting. I swirl paints onto a large canvas. As I paint I notice that images are appearing. It was like the painting process in the dream was instructing me on how I was to paint. I was in a dream group at the time and I shared this dream with the group. They told me that I needed to start painting. I told them I didn’t know how to paint. They said just do what you did in the dream.
Adhering to the dream's suggestion, I regularly begin my process by painting several colors into a background. I then stare into the background until I see an image or images appear. I then develop whatever it is that I see...a part of an animal, a bird's beak, a person's nose, etc. I develop that image and let the painting emerge.
Other times I will paint images that I meet I dreams, meditations or shamanic journeys. Sometimes images will appear that I didn’t particularly meet in the mediation or journeys but emerge from my feelings or additional contemplation or amplification on the journey experience.
I hold my paintings to be both projections of my own inner world as well as expressions of my contact with spirit beings in the greater areas of non-ordinary reality.
As you view my paintings, I invite you to let them speak to you out of your own unconscious or soul. When viewed in this matter, art opens portals between the worlds, transcending ordinary time and space and speaks directly to the soul.
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