Dreaming in the Doorway

Acrylic on wood panel diptych    72”x80”      2015

What is required to preserve and strengthen love? What is welcomed in and what is released to go out? The subtle powers of the heart are not altogether conscious. Dreaming brings them into the light. Under the moon and sun, a loving encounter unfolds. On the amphora in the birdbath the story of the hero Odysseus is drawn. He and his mates are blinding the Cyclops, Polyphemus in a bid to escape captivity and death in the cave. Caves often make me think of Plato and refer me to a place of unconsciousness and false, shadow knowledge. This gruesome drama is pictured above dancing Gorgons whose gaze could petrify. Two arcs are made overhead, one by the rise of a breeching whale and the other by the dive of a steam locomotive gone off the rails. These forces with all the symbolic connections their forms imply, will collide in the whale’s eye, everything eventually collapsing into the amphora and birdbath. Below, the blue bodied dreamer lies half submerged in the waters of the unconscious, his lower half walking sideways up the ladder to the sun, his upper half is lost in a dream, his monster mask slipping aside. The gestures of his hand and that of the enthroned interior woman meet in an infant form, she, reaching out from within the shelter of the veiled bower, he reaching in from the cold colliding night.