LOIE HOLLOWELL

Dreamt that my face was covered in gigantic zit pustules, white and yellow, red rimmed, ready to pop at any moment.  In the dream I knew that I had clean skin a year before, but I had stopped eating healthy, running, and taking showers, which was the cause of my zits.  They were so thick all you could see were my eyes, mouth, and nostrils.  My skin had so many zits on it that new skin flaps had started to grow in my hair, and were hanging in clumps, matted to my head.  Each skin clump cluttered with an equally swollen zits.  I couldn’t pop them because I knew that they would get infected and more would grow.  All I could do was stare at myself in the mirror.  It was a Dorian Grey situation.  The once beautiful, turned to ruin.  I wake up with a start and grabbed my face. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a dream.

Painting people sleeping is becoming more and more the painting of dead people.  I did not set out to paint the dead.  But very easily they have found their way in.  The Sleeping Beauty effect.  These paintings are eerie, dreamlike, grave, somber, solemn, Edward Gorey, French film, Japanese horror, Goya etchings, Marlene Dumas watercolors, The Giver.  Bleeding ink, washy, stain like style. Like the shadow knurled oak tree on a white washed barn.  A sex dream tuned violent.  Where does sleep end and death begin?  Michael Jackson died in his sleep.

Sex dream I wish not to write about and then one in which my good friend Iris was dying a slow and painful death in a hospital bed next to an old man who was more well off than her. She would have attacks in which all her nerves would tighten and her face would turn red with eyes and teeth clinched shut.  The rest of her body was white and she rested on a white hospital bed. I'd go into visit her and she would always have an attack.  During the day I listened to a radio broadcast about assisted suicide. I think in my dream I had wanted to help Iris kill herself.

I’ve been going to bed early every night since Jon’s been gone.  I go to sleep at 11 and get up at 7:30 ish. Plenty of sleep.  It’s been great.  Although for the past few nights I’ve woken up in the wee hours of morning from some kind of nightmare.  Last night I woke up from a dream in which my apartment was filling with smoke and I realized that there was no fire escape.  When I woke up I heaved the window open and realized that, sure enough, there was no fire escape.  I just moved into an apartment on the 4^th floor without checking to see if there is a fire escape.  Perhaps there a law insuring the landlord provides one.  At least he could provide us with a rope and grappling hook.  I think I’ll just go out and get one.