Dreams

I dream about houses a lot. I dream about running in old houses; houses with hidden rooms and peeling white paint on the walls. I dream often that the walls are shaky and the foundation is slipping. The houses are tall and spindly some times, and I have a mild vertigo as I climb the stairs, feeling like a drunk....disoriented and dizzy, off balance.
I dream that I don't believe that the house can stand, that it will fall around me and I'll fall with it, but I still strangely love it and can't leave it. In the end it's often all okay, and I feel a little stupid for having doubted it's integrity.

Secret Room:

The hole to the room:


A close-up of the wallpaper (at least it isn't yellow!). Roses!




I still can't believe that this was discovered in my home after my recurring dreams on the subject! Maybe it's one of those things that magically appears just when you've learned to let go of the need to seek it!
I can't figure out what the room must have been for. It's too short to stand in, but the wallpaper seems to fit its dimensions which leads me to believe that it was built/used at it's current size.
Perhaps it was a separate attic space that the house's first occupants furnished as a playroom for their children. Who knows, it obviously hasn't been open in many many decades.

Dreams Made Real:

As per this post:
We are currently having our house rewired. The workmen just discovered a Secret Room behind our kitchen. It's raised up, above our closet, but below the ceiling and attic. It's very very old, it probably hasn't been used as part of the house since the 1920s (or even later, depending on when the water heater and refrigerator nook was built in to the kitchen). It even still has some wallpaper up in it.
So Neat!!
I'll post pictures soon.

This-way-and-that...

Life has been good lately! This "status cloud" which was generated out of my Facebook status updates seem to confirm it.
I feel as if I've made a lot of progress toward living that feeling I wrote about in my last entry. I had a wonderful day off the other day; huevos rancheros for brunch, time spent with friends, including a beautiful walk through the Mountainview Cemetery. It was a very nice day out, even though Spring still has another month to show up!These three pictures are all from the Cemetery's website. I brought my camera with me, but lately I am trying to spend more time experiencing instead of documenting. Perhaps next time I will take more pictures, maybe when more trees are flowering.






































This is a picture Poet took of me at the Marin Headlands, the only photo I have finished from that set. He's a procrastinator, it may be a while before we see the rest ^__^


Next:
New art....



I am extremely happy with this piece. It's colored pencil, acrylic gold paint, and liquid gold leaf on "Scarlet Letter" paper. It's St. Cecilia. St. Cecilia is my namesaint, Sheila being the anglicized version of Cecilia/Celia .
Saint Celicia was the patron saint of music, she converted her pagan husband to Christianity and revealed to him an angel who crowned them in garlands of roses and lilies. They were both martyred; first the Romans attempted to suffocate her in the baths, but it didn't kill her. Next, they attempted to decapitate her, but her head remained partially attached. It was said she lived for three days before perishing.
Next up, new things:
I love my new boots, I found them on sale, best of all! Just when the world is ready to get rid of all their winter items, I lie in wait, ready to snatch them up!


Another new item, this one constructed by Your's Truly:


I made it using supplies from Michael's, and one of Poet's wisdom teeth.
It took me a very long time to drill through the tooth because I was worried about cracking it, but in the end it worked beautifully!

More Dreaming

Speaking of a specific Recurring Dream:
I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Angeliska Gazette: Black Honey from the Bee-Log, and saw she had a made a post about Recurring Dreams. One of the Recurring Dreams she mentioned was about secret rooms. At first, I thought to myself that I'd never had a dream like that, but then I read her description:
"I’ve had this dream since I was little,
of discovering secret rooms or chambers.
One of the first dreams I can remember,
I found an enormous cathedral-like theater
in the steeple of my church. Swooping
red curtains. An apt analogy for my young
mind to make, hmm? When I lived in
a tiny baba yaga shack with only one room,
I constantly dreamed that I would find other rooms
that always been there, behind walls or partitions.
Once I dreamt of a whole second floor!"

I started having these dreams after I grew older and began to live on my own. I didn't recognize her description immediately because my dreams were so much more adult and less fantastical that what she was talking about.
It had a yearning attached to it that was both wondrous and wanting, and in that way you only learn to want once you have known some level of poverty. It is not the same wanting you have in childhood where you are trying to find ghosts or fairies or passages through wardrobes. The dreams still have an element of fantasy and wonder to them, but that yearning that accompanies it is unique to my adult experiences.

I would dream that I was in my apartment and I would begin to wander. I would open doors and find gardens, extended rooms, extra floors, or an extension of the the complex I lived in.
Why did these dreams only start when I got older and began to live on my own, away from my parents? Do the represent some sort of recognition of my lesser means now that I support myself, a sort of anticipation of what will come once I am able to save for myself and afford better lodgings? Or something else?


My most recent version of this dream happened the other night, and took place in our current house.
I love our house. It is a Victorian duplex in a flavorful part of town. It is long and narrow, we have room for our things but it takes some arranging. Inside the house all the original fixtures and wood molding is intact, with carved runners in every room.


In my dream, we had found a way to expand the space in our house by rearranging the furniture, and our duplex turned into a huge, expansive mansion with high ceilings.
However, in the dream, the house was in a level of rather deep decay. We had minimal furniture, the rafters were all exposed, and it was dark and drafty inside.


Just as the interior state of our old house was exaggerated, so was the exterior. Outside I could hear all sorts of ruckus, and people were loitering around conspicuously in a way that I found very unsettling.

The house was mostly a brick red, like the one in this picture I found.

The neighborhood was in decay too. I was anxious and relieved all at once. I had a grand interior, but it was in poor condition. And I was high up above the fray but it was closing in and the doors were weak. It was such a strange dream, filled with a desire to shut out the world and yet to escape.

And yet, near the end of the dream the people I was so fearful of noticed the house falling and propped up the walls and fastened them in place as I hid inside the crumbling structure.

All I can think is that maybe the dream is about my own anxiety. That it's all too easy to see things in great exaggeration and let your perception run away with your good sense. You are suddenly fighting flight or fight, and next thing you know the things you're so frightened of weren't so bad after all, and have a way of resolving themselves if you are just patient enough, and open-minded enough to give events a chance to unfold.
I am definitely in a tense situation involving home right now, where I have to wait for the other shoe to drop before I can decide what will become of our situation. We have no to little control over what we're waiting to here on, and all we can really do is determine whether we will leave our home or remain. In the mean time, waiting to find out...it is better not to let anxiety bubble up and become a storm. If there's nothing you can do, then spend your time waiting enjoying what you have instead of fearing what you can't control. Or something like that....
What do you think? Have you ever had a dream like this, and if so, what did it mean to you?

New and Old Art

This is a quick pen sketch I did a couple weeks ago, however I do not have the means to complete it as I usually would before posting it online. While I wait for a new computer I don't have photoshop to add textures and correct color, I don't even have a scanner to use.
Believe it or not often half the work of using photoshop is to make an image resemble itself on a computer screen as it does in the real world.
In any case, here it is:



































And I'd also like to share an older one that I meant to upload previously but somehow missed:
This one was inspired by an image I found in a book of vintage erotica. I loved the concept of the image but it was done so simplistically for a magazine cover, and I wanted to try and spend a bit of time and detail on it, and do it justice.


I'm really proud of the line work and shading I did on this one. I titled it "Cannelle et Clous de Girofle"
which means "cinnamon and cloves."
I sort of love the somewhat naive concepts about eroticism and exotica that came from that era. Not that eroticism on it's own was a naive concept back then, we have a tendency in these times too look back on earlier times as being closeted and ignorant of sex, eroticism, and perversion. Trust me, they could be quite scandalous, they were human back then too, after all!
But I do love the idea of what at the time was considered "exotic" being automatically erotic, there are so many neat photos of such "naughty" fan girls haha....
Maybe I'll make some more art of that theme.






Here is the original:










































Mata Hari:

Other lovelies. Would we think these women were beautiful if they were walking around today? Probably not, we've learned such a critical eye! We should learn to relax and enjoy beauty out of context the way we do when we're looking at someone from another era.