It’s very exciting that my new website is now up and running and I give much thanks to a great team who’ve worked tirelessly, while battling with me over my less than conventional ideas, to put this all together.
As you will see there are five doors on my homepage.
I fought hard for the inclusion of these doors because, in as much as every painting of mine tells a story, so does my website.
Doorway to Dreams
Dreams are a crucial component to my work and also my spiritual development. I can remember dreams going right back to the crib. My earliest memorable dream was full of colour and imagery, sound and emotion.
I’m familiar with patterns of recurring dreams too. Without any doubt the most frequent one has been about rooms in houses, which has been a persistent visitor throughout my adulthood.
Not any old houses I might add, but grand old gothic mansions with many many rooms behind closed doorways. The houses are huge, exciting, creepy and haunted. There is that thrill of the scary movies. You just don’t want to look, your heart beats in your throat, but you just have to. You wish you’d never switched the television on, but you can’t switch it off.
In all of these dreams, the houses are mine but I can only live in a small part of the house. For me many of the rooms are out of bounds. The doors having been closed off by me years earlier and never revisited. These rooms are haunted. In the worst cases they are places of poltergeist or demonic activity. Thankfully that latter type of dream is few and far between but in all the dreams these rooms really do spook me out.
In one dream I recall being brave enough to enter one of the rooms. Drop sheets covered the furniture and the ghost of an old lady was seen rocking away in an old chair.
In my most recent dream, I had actually sold this old place. The cost of maintaining such an enormous house, whose expanse went to waste, forced my hand into moving the family and dogs to a tiny apartment by the sea. When I showed the purchasers around my house one last time they asked me to open up the door to a large old room. I’d never had the courage to open this door before and it was with trepidation that I did. What was revealed behind this door was a magnificent sight to behold. An enormous dining room or even a ballroom, hosting a massive marble fireplace and sky high windows framed by lush
red velvet curtains. Grand chandeliers hung from the ceiling. We all gasped at the wonder of this dusty old room bursting with potential. There were no ghosts in here, just an exciting opportunity I’d denied myself. It was too late, the house was no longer mine.
This, I believe, is the message being sent to me in all these dreams. Not to deny myself opportunities out of fear. To find the courage to push myself forward and explore new parts of my psyche so that I can live my life to my fullest potential.
This brings me onto the most remarkable dream of them all. The very key that opens those doors on my website.
Once again I’m back in that old wooden mansion. Despite my fear I venture into one of the closed off rooms and go to sleep there. Soon I’m awoken by a ghost child, but she isn’t frightening at all. She leads me through a door and up some stairs.
I’m in an old unexplored, part of the house. Ahead of me is a long dark corridor and to the left are rows upon rows of doors. To the right of me is a door opening onto an enormous ballroom. Ghostly characters meet me inside. Little people, adults and children all in period costumes as well as a friendly dog. They are warm and welcoming, but don’t say a word as they take me by the hand. There’s something strangely familiar about them. I’m sure I’ve seen them in an old painting somewhere. They lead me over to a man who has been lurking in the shadows. He wears black, has a curled up moustache and long black hair. He’s my host, an engaging character who does all the talking. He really puts me at ease as he takes me up onto a stage and shows me around the wings, with the other characters following behind.
Then my host leads me off the stage, across the corridor and opens one of the doors. “There” he says “this is all yours”. I look around a room full of hundreds upon hundreds of paintings, all stacked neatly and purposefully. “This is your future. These are all your paintings. All of these and more. Don’t look at them. They don’t belong to you yet. You have to paint them first. For your sake and for ours”.
When I woke up I looked through all of my books on art to find out why this scene and it’s people were so familiar to me.
My jaw dropped when I stumbled upon the very painting – Las Meninas by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez painted in 1656. It hadn’t been a painting I was very familiar with but mysteriously the characters in my dream were exactly matched to those in this painting. The room was too. As for my very charming host, it was the artist himself, Diego Velazquez.
In “Las Meninas”, Velazquez paints himself into the painting, surrounded by courtiers of the royal household and the young princess Margaret Theresa.
Las Meninas – Diego Velazquez
As you click on each door of my home page, please know that you are being invited in to explore parts of my psyche that at times I fear so much, but nevertheless I embrace.
I hope you will share in the thrill and delight of exploring these rooms with me while all the while embracing your own limitless potential.
