I pulled a big old canvas out of the closet and set it on top of the bookshelves with the koi, putting it on my “to do” list to finish. And standing back, it begins to look a lot like the koi theme in a different form. I started the painting of the winter mountain before I began painting koi. It’s based on a rather famous photograph (don’t tell anyone), and I have worried about the question of copy-right. I’d love to compare it now with its original, but as so often happens, I don’t know where the source photo vanished to.
How odd, though, to be indebted to an anonymous photographer for an image that so neatly anticipates my koi obsession. But it doesn’t end there.
It imitates the forms of another picture, too — one “unrelated” to the koi. In the collage of the child asleep in dreams, a stream defies gravity by rising up like a mountain — and of course, the mountain rises up like a mountain too. These different forms sprawl in much the same ways.
Looking into one’s mind reveals weird metaphors. Even in stealing, I only take my own obsessions back from the hands of others. And somehow in my occasional housekeeping, I manage to unearth these things at apt moments when the mixed metaphors can meet each other in daylight.
I have a well etched fissure in my brain somewhere, drawn by neurons firing. I’m guessing that under closer inspection, it probably looks a bit like one of these pictures!
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 
That is so fascinating – a repeating theme that comes out in different paintings. What a lovely colourful combination of artwork and furniture. I think the bookshelf is trying to tell you something ‘help, let me out!’ I have the same thing with the poems I have written – repeated themes that were unintended (subconscious wailings I think). Thanks for sharing your work spaces.
The mountain and the collage have so much in common, the shapes, the colors,the division in the center in the sky with that big red-magenta area at right…it is fascinating to see what one is fascinated by.
Je suis toujours impressionnée de voir la taille de tes peintures.
We have to let our fascinations and unintentions comes to light, yes. –ak
Very interesting AK. I remember an art instructor talking about having a student do a large number of drawings. Then putting all the drawings down on the floor and looking at them. It turned out that they were all related to a car wreck in which someone was killed (can’t remember but think it was the student’s father) and the drawings were all connected to a pair of broken glasses that were found at the site of the wreck. We probably all do subconscious expressions in our attempts at “art”.
That’s quite a story. The ol’ subconscious is a busy place indeed. ak
Looks like your subconscious is telling you to take a long break!
No, more like my stomach! Happy Thanksgiving (belatedly)!