Dreaming is Painting

Sometime last week I was in a beautiful dream. I had just wrapped up the last class of the semester as professor, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what class. It was clearly something in which I actually had some level of expertise as opposed to one of my reoccurring nightmares where I am teaching a class in Biology or Mathematics having not prepared the syllabus on the first day of class, nor even attempted a degree in the field. Talk about graduating! I used to have dreams about missing an entire semester of a class I was sure I dropped only to be staring down a thick textbook and ninety minutes to learn a semester’s worth of math on my own before the final began. Anyways, in this recent dream it was a good teaching experience. The students were respectful and grateful, I felt filled with the sense of a beautiful learning journey and community that we co-built together. After wrapping up the class I went to my painting studio that was on campus, and gave a student a tour of my space. I was working on twelve paintings and they lined the walls, hung perfectly so that each of the various sizes could each have a home. I was working in oil so all the paintings were at a variety of completion, layers on layers, and in my dream state my observing self told me, “I need to remember this composition.” Dream KCF told the Watcher KCF that this was a great painting, and the Watcher KCF knew it to also be true. The colors were working, the relationships between these buildings were working, proportions were on, and the light, there was this incredible capturing of light happening there. It was a painting that a different version of me had made, my unconscious me, that definitely was playing with visual elements that waking/watcher/conscious me doesn’t spend that much time working through. Me care about light? No thank you, all my compositions are more or less evenly lit, over-exposed, bright. The power for me comes from colors creating light effects on their own, I am not one who really attends to light as in focusing on shadows or how light is operating in a space realistically. But this painting that Dream Me made - woah!

Maybe this is my obsessive mind’s way to work through creativity challenges but I consistently dream I am painting as soon as I move from the painting in theory process (gathering my materials, sketching compositional ideas, building a stretcher, priming the canvas) to the painting in action process (putting paint on the canvas). Some of this is clearly anxiety dreaming because sometimes I’m reworking what I’ve already put down on the canvas in my waking time. But sometimes, this dream state of painting is like an extra painting session where my body does not ache from standing at my easel for too long, where every brush stroke is perfect, where there is no negative self-talk, just me and all the best parts of painting. What’s fun is that usually my Dreaming Painter is working on paintings that I have on my easel, and in this most recent dream state I was seeing the Dreaming Painter making things I have not yet made. What was she trying to tell me? Has she gone rogue? Has she jumped forward in our timeline toward paintings I am supposed to make in my lifetime, that haven’t come to life yet?

Painting is dreaming in the sense that I’m moved to do it in my waking life as well as in my sleeping life. Dreaming is also painting. Dreams are so ephemeral, hard to grasp, ever shifting and changing and I would argue like any good painting, attempting to make sense of a moment in time and providing that moment back to the more conscious self in visual form. Narrative paintings (the kind I’m really into making and looking at) are often mashups of space, time, and the content attempts to tell a story across and throughout a plane instead of a linear from point a to point b form. Paintings require interpretation by the artist and the viewer, like a dream the messages within are sometimes explicit and clear while other times obscured or not yet revealed to the looker. Paintings and dreams may offer a reflection, but most likely they are more often a window to something deeper. Painting is a process like dreaming. By that I mean that for me painting and dreaming feel like I am both a part of it and observing it simultaneously. It is so incredible to think of that possibility, to be of something but also to be outside of it, but like any activity in which you can get into “the zone” time no longer feels the same, action happens, you’re channelling it, but it’s not driven by your conscious mind when you’re in the zone. The painterly self then is analogous to the dreaming self, a part of it, but mostly just along for the ride.

I’m also intrigued by the words like dream and paint that function as both verbs and nouns. To dream of painting then means something from each verb and noun state. It can account for that metaphysical state of knowing that you’re accessing something in your sleep and it can also function as a map for your waking life. For me, I dream of painting means I actually do dream I’m painting but it also means I long for the space, time, and materials to paint. These days I am grateful to the dream of painting because when it pulls me to my canvas I work out this pent up angst within, it’s a cure better than any other I’ve found to transform my internal turmoil into something more useful to me. The amount of pure concentration it requires to move a brush filled with paint across a surface is a beautiful reset. I’m grateful for finding this path in my waking and my sleeping life. And I shudder to think about how I would be contorting myself into a less balanced version of me if I had not found this deep calling. It reminds me of the powerful poem by Langston Hughes What Happens to a Dream Deferred? The sadness and loss by those separated from the conditions to be able to fulfill their dreams is a reminder of the value in protecting all of our dreams. And, that the dream alone is never enough. I hope that you keep dreaming of painting (or whatever your creative venture may be) and that we are collectively creating the conditions so as to make room for your dreams in this waking world too.

What I’m Reading

 Females, Andrea Long Chu

This pocket-sized book has been on my bedside table begging to be read and instead collecting dust until last weekend when I found myself in need of a portable book for a plane ride. While definitely accessible if you’re familiar with Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (which if you’re not and want to give this a read, you can easily find copies of it on the internet), the book is cultural criticism meets feminist philosophy that hinges on the assertion that everyone (regardless of gender) is female. If you’re intrigued by that premise, this book is definitely for you. I’ve long admired ALC’s writing and was eagerly awaiting this book to come out, it’s humorous and thought provoking and the perfect book to take your mind off of turbulence if you happen to find yourself in the sky, or if not, it would make for a good lakeside/beach read. The short chapters give you a lot to mull over, and you can enjoy the small work in short bites. ALC’s writing style itself is a marvel with so much intrigue threaded into each sentence. It’s a book centering a feminist theory rooted in challenging basic agreements around gender, sex, and desire that is difficult to fully describe making it a queer intellectual success.

Artist Offerings

• As a child of the 80s/90s I live for neon and I’m obsessed with Jennifer Small’s fluorescent compositions 
• Part oral history, part digital archive contribution read about this intersection of gay liberation and the Black Panthers to celebrate Pride with a side of history. 
• I loved this write up about Yikui (Coy) Gu's paintings that are hodgepodges of Asian American experience and pop culture. 
• The LA Times had me at “Pop Art Nun”
• Get inspired by some “Popular Painters” also not popular in the way you might think it be described (at least I was intrigued)
• I am still trying to take advantage of digital offerings out there for accessing art I wouldn’t otherwise have access to, as such I just took part in one of the guided tours of Carmen Chami’s exhibition up at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago - which if you’re around Chicago will be accessible in person beginning in July and then it will be up for a few months.
• A friend recommended this essay -- High-Rise Syndrome by Sally Wen Mao -- to me and wow does it pack a punch. It’s the best thing I’ve read since the last newsletter went out.

Creative Ritual

What a few weeks it has been since last newsletter! My grandfather passed away the day after my last correspondence went out and juggling another trip to Kansas alongside managing logistics on getting three large paintings to Indianapolis the same weekend took up a lot of my time. Super grateful to my number one guild member (Vaimo) who took the paintings all the way without me! In the haze of traveling and recalibrating after three weeks of an interrupted schedule I somehow managed to apply to a masterclass painting class that will take place the last couple of weeks of July before my hermanitas arrive for summer camp for the month of August. The class feels like a stretch beyond my technical level but here I am as usual just trying for the fun of it and because I’m addicted to being overcommitted. I just learned today that I have been accepted to the class and received a scholarship for the intensive painting study! I recorded some video interview footage for some marketing ventures. I sold the last of four of the Breakfast Still Life paintings making 2021 seriously my best painting selling year so far. Speaking of painting, I finished up a small commission for my bestie that will soon adorn his walls in LA and will soon be revealed on my IG feed. I've been plugging along a 30-day embroidery course so that I can learn new stitches for my fabric elements of my paintings. And, as you already know, I've been dreaming of paintings lately that are driving my studio practice forward, steadily making progress on a work that I think will birth a new series for me, time shall tell!

Questions to Ponder

How do the creative muses visit you in your waking and sleeping hours?
What are your dreams telling you?
Have you checked in on your dreams lately?
What dreams are you deferring and why?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

PS: If you are inspired by what you find here, please share with someone else who you think would be too! Special shout out to my two monthly Ko-Fi sustainers! Want to join the club?