I was inspired to paint the piece I call DIZZY DEMONS by a recurring dream I've had for the last three decades. The demons in the dream are not so much dizzy as silly and inconsistent. I couldn't decide while I was actually having the dreams whether they were going to kill me while I was dreaming or just make me laugh. Additionally, I could never get a fix on a cultural reference from the demons or some kind of time period in which they exist. The closes I could come was post biblical Constantinople. During their reign none of the people in X province were ever sure what the demons wanted from them. Kind of like life, eh? So to me, the demons are very ambivalent figures. On the one hand, they're very amiable and have a lot of hobbies and games that they play. I was always smiling nervously znd amused when hanging out with the dizzy demons. On the other hand, the dizzy demons were​/​ are capable of great destruction. I watched them lay waste to one of their fiefdoms because they did not enjoy its muggy weather. I approached the process of making the piece as an exercise in absentminded doodling. I thought about the dream I had experienced and looked at the almost identical accounts I has written to describe the dream as soon as I had awoken from it, over a period of years. While I was in therapy with a Jungian in Brookline, MA named Dr. Joel Covitz during my freshman year in college, he had me write down and then paint my dreams. Dr. Covitz said that many dreams were simply residue, effluvia one was processing from the day before. However Covitz also told me that dreams that are recurring are often what Jungians term Archetypical. Carl Jung believed that recurring dreams are trying to communicate something important to us. Ok, this must be a significant dream. So, without consciously deciding on materials, I started to sketch directly onto the canvas in acrylic paint paint with a small brush. Then, I went over it with acrylic paint markers. The great thing about acrylic paint pens is that if you don't like what you're doing, you can just paint over it. And I did a lot of over painting on this piece. Some figures and shapes that I enjoy I decided to leave alone. I then deployed some watered down acrylic paint, mostly dark greys, umber and Burnt Sienna. I used these paints to block out the areas of the canvas that didn't bring joy pr move the eye. I enjoy this intuitive process of working. After approximately a year of occassionally messing with the piece, I still judged that it did not fully cohere or ' say anything.' So I put it away, behind stacks of other pieces. Then when I would be bored with other projects I'd work on this piece sporadically for 15 minute at a time. When I am stuck creatively, I often turn my work upside down The upside down method technique is very freeing. It's often easier to work on paintings when they're upside down. Why? Because of a natural tendency to paint what we think rather than what we truly see in the mind's eye. The demons were painted upside down. Eventually, I started to enjoy the composition. The spare use of color and the expressions on the faces are meant to be both playful and slightly ominous. So what do you think of dizzy demons?

Artwork Size & Ink Base:

61 x122

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Daniel Aaron Schwartz

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