Yesterday afternoon I got back on my metaphoric Horse and  did a bit of art.

A few years ago I used to keep regular dream diaries which I obsessively illustrated and filled with a plethora of disturbing and surreal imagery. I’d spent most of my life having generally unsettled dreams and nightmares; it became a revelation when, as a teenager I discovered H.R Giger and read that he also had the same problem with his sleeping hours, only he decided to illustrate them.

I think it was from then on that I decided to do the same.

For many years that followed and several books, I detailed all that I could remember from my night time wonderings of my soul. I think it is fair to say, I even began to love the bad dreams (always retrospectively), for even they provided me with a rich, symbolic source of material from which to write about and illustrate.

The only problem I encountered was that I had a very niche audience of friends who were appreciative of my creative outpourings. The rest of the world would look at my art from a disturbed perspective, then look at me as If I had something wrong with me and that would be that.

I generally didn’t mind too much but began to recognise that

If drawing from my subconscious was going to be my ‘Modus Operandi’  for illustration, then I was always going to run into the problem of disturbing/alienating seventy percent of my prospective audience!

Moving on several years, I’d dedicated less and less time to recalling dreams, writing them down & drawing them. I had virtually dried up on the illustration side of my creativity.

I’d met my Tanya, and put much more time into photographing the things that interested me in the world outside my head. People were generally far more appreciative of my photographic offerings and rarely went pale at the sight of my latest imagery.  A much more satisfying experience on the whole.

Recently however, I’ve had an increasingly gnawing feeling in my guts that I’ve been making excuses for NOT doing more personal artwork, a kind of self censorship. My dreams are far less disturbing these days , but the old imagery still haunts me. Its as if those old illustrations were seeds I’d planted, waiting to grow into a more eloquent visual form.

In all honesty, I’m not completely satisfied with it and may well try again. It was a success in other ways though, I really enjoyed the business of creating the piece, 90% of which was a physical, tangible process. I’ve given myself a little bit of a confidence boost which I intend to build upon. I know I’ll still be freaking out and alienating a whole bunch of people who don’t like this sort of imagery, however I think in order to be true to myself, I should not get so concerned about the negative points of view and create in the spirit of just putting some love into being artistic. So the period of self censorship is finally over, expect more artwork soon.

So yesterday I decided to approach a particularly poignant image from around 1993 and tackle it from a fresh perspective. If anything, the new work is far more frightening than the original.