Dream

      I can't explain what about cutting and arranging tiny little pieces of paper thrills me so. Paintings may bore or frustrate me after a period of time until I am either inclined to put them away for a while or declare them finished, but I never tire of paper crafts. I suppose it's related somehow to my love of books and the book arts in general, the weaving of a truly good story. Flat illustrations and paintings make good windows through which to peer into a storybook world. But the building up of layers of paper into something three-dimensional seems to draw the fairytale through the window and into our actual physical space, much the way the expert crafting of words in a great novel does.
      This particular papercut has its roots in a rather roughly executed watercolor collage from a decade ago. The original ideas actually centered on what it meant to be a woman, and the imagery centered on what I felt at the time comprised her true essence--something natural, wild, undeniably powerful and quietly strong, both familiar and mysterious, pure, earthly, and sacred. Only a small part survived when I constructed the new drawing this papercut is based on, but it is a topic I will undoubtedly continue to explore. I honestly don't know much about this woman's story, or what other grand adventures await her in and beyond this dream. There was just something so enigmatic about this particular moment in the dream, I felt myself continually drawn back. One thing that fascinates me about dreams is their ability to sometimes reveal more about a person's true nature than the events that occur in waking can. In dreams, seemingly disparate parts coexist harmoniously, however illogically. In our waking selves, it is not always so. We are made up of so many faculties with such varied functions that can seem so opposed that, combined with the constant barrage of images and competing, often contradictory information society throws at us, it can be easy to feel lost and fragmented. But in dreams, our rational selves are turned off just enough that our bodies and imaginations remember that all these faculties were naturally made to work together, and however briefly, all those disjointed pieces come together and reintegrate--into something strange, perhaps, but certainly into something splendid. No matter how ridiculously we might feel about it in the morning.