Beached Casket, or The Third Gift From My Guardian Angel, after Wilhelm Eichmann (1732-1808)
This work, like two others before it which have not yet been publicly displayed, came to me in a dream. I note that it was not the *scene* which I saw in my dream, but the image itself, fully formed, floating before me, like a work in some spectral gallery show. This latest dream, which I had in June 2025, presented this work to me as part of a show of the forgotten German painter, Wilhelm Eichmann, whose work is now considered to prefigure modernism. Let us be clear: Eichmann is not a real historical figure, at least not in our reality.
For these reasons, I don't consider the dream paintings to be surreal. They are not attempts to transcribe the inscrutable logic of the subconscious, or reveal hidden worlds. They are messages, or gifts, passed to me directly by my subconscious -- attempts by someone within to communicate with someone without. If the mind that produced these images could speak in words, what would it say?
Had this one sitting in the studio for a long time. It still almost feels wrong to call it finished, but there's so many parts of this that work perfectly, so why let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Title is "elective reduction" (ie, elective breast reduction, ie, top surgery).
I've been doing more short drawings recently, and on smaller paper. Maybe it makes the tension of a composition more apparent?
@modelevivant.e@_misambre
portrait of @m4croplastic !
I think we spent about 90 minutes total with the pose.
this one ended up with a narrower, and more naturalistic, color palette, but as I've recently learned, a restrictive gamut can really let individual hues shine through more!
Arboretum
I posted an earlier version of this but I didn't like the face. So here's the finished one, with a less detailed face.
This is the first work I've done entirely in oil pastels, and it's super super freeing.
The new pictorial idea that I'm developing is to envelop the figure in a composition that uses the same basic shapes as are present in the body.
