Living Designs

This is an image taken from a dream, but surely someone knows the feeling of swimming at night, and that is not a dream. To swim at night, in the ocean or a lake, tell me, what is the feeling? What images would you use to describe your sensations and your thoughts? This image is one I have worked over and over, erasing and redrawing, since 1997, and it is now 2007 -- so for ten years. For me, it holds some of the mystery of swimming at night. A person, an animal, a house: the shadows a bit obscure, but the sense of containment and wildness there.

Window and tree, or windows and tree ... views from one way considered from another. When did I do this image? When would someone else have done this image, or wanted this sort of image? When would someone want an image of a tree caught between two windows, on either side of an architectural/continental divide? I did it when I was thinking of going into medicine, after a life-time of wanting/hoping to be a writer, or its defunct (to me), a painter: A person who had the fantasy of being noticably by what she had to say. As a painter, it was as someone who was noticable by what she could image forth. No one wants to be "something" (a painter, a writer, an accountant, etc), without wanting to be noticed for something, or at least to have experienced at some point that one's skills were well put. One hardly waits around to be nothing. And yet, recently, I found myself strangely overjoyed by a small moment in the movie Man on a Train, where the poetry teacher in a small French...