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Silky's Woodcuts

Dreamed 2006/12/15 by Wayan

I carved wooden blocks to make a set of color prints. Or maybe I just used scratchboard or digital graphics to fake woodblock prints, I don't know. But I proudly issue the set in a box opening on one edge, like a boxed set of books.

The series shows my anima Silky as a mare-girl, mostly human but with a mare's pointed ears and tail, sitting in a light wooden chair, drinking tea and contemplating a series of round ink sketches on the wall--that famous set of Zen paintings of an ox. Rough and woodcutty. Colorful. Each print shows Silky from a different angle, and not quite the same moment--time shifts as well as space. Like the panels of comics.

I think there were ten, but I woke hazy on some; here are the first and last three, as I recall them more clearly.

Mare-girl contemplates Zen drawings of an ox. Faux woodcuts by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

The very last panel has just an empty chair. It's like the last of those Zen paintings, the one titled "The Ox has Left."

The Nightmare has left. But I wish she'd come back.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

This dream may hide a couple of messages under its skin: Mare-girl contemplates Zen drawing of an ox. Faux woodcut by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

  1. ACTION: Let Silky's energy into my life more! More play, sex, fun!
  2. ACTION: Don't worry that fun undermines spirituality. Silky's contemplating Zen art here! That is, dream-art IS my spiritual practice. Each dream is a new panel in an ongoing, lifelong graphic novel mapping a spiritual journey. A lot more than ten panels, but then I'm a slow learner.
But those are symbolic, indirect interpretations. I could be wrong. Always consider the obvious first--take the dream literally!
  1. ACTION: Draw these images, play with this style! Instead of my usual painstaking pencil drawings... Chop! Scribble! Bold! Rough!
Dream researchers often seem wary of the literal. But why wouldn't a working artist have dreams proposing art projects to try? Over the years, I've had plenty--the transparent pages of Overlay, the watercolor-comics of The Hedgehog Dispensary, or the series of dreams like Tilt the Globe urging me to build Planetocopia; even earlier prompts to try woodcuts, like Deertaur Transformation.

My dreams are rarely just art prompts. Filly's Quest is more like Silky's Woodcuts--mixed. In that dream a picturebook both glories in images for their own sake, and critiques heavy-handed Freudianism, using sex and humor to lure me into shamanic dreamwork--dreams as life experiences, not codes to crack.

I'm not alone in the art thing. A lot of Jenny Badger Sultan's dreamlife, like Moving in the Landscapes of my Dreams, and the majority of Jim Shaw's published dreams, are prompts for art experiments. At least the ones he draws! Remember that, before you get too skeptical. Naturally a website focused on dream art & stories will have dreams about creative concerns! It's not that I, or Jenny, or Jim never had dreams about anxieties, or a sore toe, or tomorrow's appointments.

But also... woodcuts.


LISTS AND LINKS: Silky - animas & guides - animal people - horses - babes, hunks & sexy creatures - Zen Buddhism - art experiments - (faux) woodblock prints - comics/sequential art

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