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| An abstract cartoon? |
As a kid I had a few recurring dreams that routinely woke me up in a panic. Some were violent.
In my mid-30s, I
started trying to make art based on a couple of those haunting dreams. The image above is the result of one of those attempts in 1983. There was a sense of swirling inward or converging to the dream that I tried to capture and depict. At the time, I was happy with the finished product. I remember thinking then that it was sort of an abstract cartoon.
Anyway, the recurring dreams of my childhood weren't all scary. I liked the ones in which I could fly. Waking up was always a disappointment. One of those other un-scary recurring dreams left a mysterious image tattooed on my memory, but I didn't know what it meant. Rather than a storyboard of a scene, it was just a single frame. In the frame was the shadow of a man that was being cast upon the leaf-covered ground. It looked like a black-and-white photo that had been tinted subtly with earthy colors.
There was no clue as to who the man was; no sense of what he was doing. The image did move, ever so slightly, then the picture faded to black. Or maybe it just disappeared.
As an adult, my recurring dreams gradually stopped. Occasionally, something would remind me of one of the scary ones, but the spooky feeling those dreams used to leave as an aftermath was gone. And, by then I didn't even think about the shadow man image any more.
Many years later, one afternoon in the fall, I was walking along a Frisbee-golf course fairway as it skirted the woods. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks, looking down at the mysterious man from my childhood on the ground.
The shadow moved ever so slightly, as I stood watching, knowing at that moment that the shadow man dream of my childhood had been a preview of me with the body and stance of a man in his 50s.
A connection was made and the circle was complete.That was my own "La Jetée" (1962) moment. So far, the only one.
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