Thursday, March 26, 2009

"Night Visitor" Painting of a Childhood Memory



Night Visitor, Regan Lee 1990
acrylic on Masonite

This is a painting I did several years ago. At that time, I was trying to paint images of beings/visitors from my childhood. The ones I tried to do of the "aliens" that floated me out the door always ended up like stick figures, with inverted triangle/oval outlines for the face, but no features. I realized the other day I've made many paintings and drawings of figures, usually female forms, with these inverted triangle/oval faces, always featureless. I seem to place them alone in a room by a window revealing a night sky.

The painting shown here is a little underexposed, but it's the only image I have right now; the painting is big and heavy (painted on a large thick piece of Masonite) and packed away somewhere. I just started painting it; I remember feeling compelled and it just all came out very quickly; this large "Night Visitor" and at the time, the full title was "Night Visitor on Sherbourne Street" (even though the name was actually Sherbourne Drive but I thought Street sounded better.) That was the house I lived in in Los Angeles between the ages of six to about fourteen, and the house where the fuzzy puppet wolves and beings that floated me out the door came.

As to this being in the painting, I never saw anything like this, but I remember the feeling. . . it's as if the image came up from my subconscious in a very vivid and strong way and represents something that has a connection to all this.

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