My current paintings are intersections of abstract paintings and my dreams, which I have been writing down whenever I can remember them for the past three or four years. Below are some recent notes about this idea and these paintings:

6-20-18     Serial attributes of the dream paintings (what is repeated about the work): proportion of the whole painting, encounter of one dream per painting with “painting elements”  Seriality is not a virtue in itself because of its status as a painting convention, but it parallels the (sleep-dream) / (wake-work) cycle and its reiteration in time.

6-21-18     A dream framed, given opportunity for oracular disclosure, an artifact flatly given, just content, not including / not excluding either significance or banality.

6-27-18     paintings in series = beads on a string

7-10-18     The implication that something of great profundity is going to be announced– but what arrives is just ambiguous and possibly inert.  A mocking of the idea of assumed meaningful narrative, or a way of having automatically generated human content– humanist by having it, but ambivalent about what that would mean

7-15-18     Dream paintings: tracking nervous subjectivity

7-25-18     Dream paintings: more comfortable with seriality of format because it is linked to involuntary repetitions

8-1-18     The dream paintings as strange greeting cards: a “design” (outer) relating to some convention of design (fabric? mosaic? abstract painting?)   Inside, a short text that seems to mean something– but does it? (A text open to various applications)

 

–Ken Weathersby