I HELD THE SUN ROSE by Chris Wayan.
I drew a plain gray silhouette: an animal goddess checking a protostar in the void. Then I set my paint program to make new colors smear outward from the hearts of old. Swept my mouse across, and she BLOOMED! Fusion-roses...
After I drew it, I dreamed I was chasing stars with a long-tailed friend. And in the end, we caught the sun...

HAWK ANGEL--dreamed and drawn by Chris Wayan.
I was walking down a farm road; snowy peaks on the horizon. On top of a high stone wall, looking out over the fields, perched a woman with the distant gaze of a hawk. And wings. She ignored me.
The president of the world walked up, and said "She's an angel--you're like a WORM to her. You're low, earthbound... disgusting!"
But SHE said nothing of the sort.
Just as I started to wonder why he was trying so hard to keep me away from her... I woke.
She looked a bit fierce, but I wish I'd seen through him faster and talked to her. Still, I did learn: the voice inside that says I'm dull and worthless, that sabotages my dates, is someone I disliked on sight. Disliked and disrespected.
Disbelief may take longer, but... it's coming.

GHOST DOGS
Digital one-page comic telling a dream, by Chris Wayan.
I meet a talking wolf-dog who invites me to join Dr Who's pack of sexy Ghost Wolves. I find the wolves turn me on as much as human girls. But there's a small catch... they really are ghosts!
You have to die to get in.
So... how bad do I want a girlfriend?

FOUR LOVERS
Sketched 1991-2, shaded 2001, by Chris Wayan.
I want to live in a group marriage with talking animals as well as conventional humans. This isn't an idle sex fantasy. It'll happen within my lifetime. We'll share this world with other species. And love will be quite different.
2001 NOTE:
When I wrote that, ten years ago, it seemed bizarre. Now it looks likely. Soon we'll see humans changing form--sculpting themselves--with viral programs, and creating animal people with human intelligence but nonhuman instincts. I'm looking forward to it, and not for sexual reasons. I'm curious how much of "human" "nature" is really big-brain nature, and how much is just ape-nature. Not the only sort of nature on this planet.

ERECTION 2000 - Ceramic sculpture, 9" tall, 2000, by Chris Wayan.
A sculpture of an equitaur candidate, glad-handing with the only hand he has. My cynical tribute to the OTHER disaster everyone forgot on 9/11/2001: our corrupt, nepotistic, stolen election. Thousands of black and Jewish voters disenfranchised by state police commanded by one candidate's powerful brother... can you say "banana republic"?
And no, I'm not a disgruntled Gore voter. I voted for Nader, and I don't regret it. I'm in California and both big parties ignored us. At least Nader, like McCain, campaigned strongly for election reform. Not to mention the credibility he'd have had in the Near East! Lieberman was the first Jewish candidate on a national ticket, but the media ignored that Nader was a bigger first--the first Arab-American ever to run. Would Israel/Palestine be at war today...?
Sorry. A classic example of notes run wild.

FIGURE DRAWING: DAPPLED
2000, only 4x4"; pastel with digital retouching by Chris Wayan.
A pensive woman with mixed cat genes, leaning on a tilted rock slab, eyes closed, looking melancholy. It was drawn from life, with a few imaginary spots.

COYOTE ANGEL by Chris Wayan, 1999.
Back view of a half-done sculpture: a 3D snapshot of a shapeshifter caught in mid-transformation, as her wings form, or dissolve...

THE WOBBLY CENTAURS
1990 dream-sketch by Chris Wayan.
I read Yeats's famous poem "The Second Coming", the one starting "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold..."
That night I dreamed I went to a nude beach we have here in San Francisco. I laid out my blanket and looked around. Next to me on the sand was a family of crudely-drawn cartoon centaurs. They were just wobbly doodles, oscillating sloppily from equine to human...
I got to talking with a cartoon centaur girl and found she just LOOKED shaky. Her mood didn't wobble! Always serene. Happy, unlike the tense, carefully buffed humans sunning all around us...
Perhaps it's time to resurrect the Wobblies in more senses than one.

CENTAUR AND STAR
Early (1994) digital image by Chris Wayan.
I love how (on this planet at least) we're animals yet our eyes can jump across light-years by SEEING... Such hybrids we are, part dirt part star.
So I painted myself as a centaur--one body, both animal and soul. Who never really left the Garden. It's all around us, in the night, in our dreams.
OK, I admit it's not easy to act on that insight, bringing your dreams into daylight...

CENTAUR WITH STAFF OF POWER
Old ink drawing colored in Photoshop, 2001, by Chris Wayan.
In a meadow, a centaur woman raises a staff capped by a globe of gold light. The drawing's years old, and I'm no longer sure just what she was invoking--all I recall is, it involved an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of eternal life.

PAULINA AT SUNSET
14x17" drawing, Sanford erasable crayons, by Chris Wayan.
Paulina Porizkova modeled swimsuits in Sports Illustrated once. In an interview, she said she didn't diet--it's genetic. Weirdly, her height and weight were almost exactly mine! Suddenly the whole fuss over anorexic rolemodels felt silly. I get shit for my slenderness too, but differently, because I'm male: the same proportions that make actresses and models both rich and criticized, make women shun me--they figure I'm dying of AIDS. Same numbers: sexy, not sexy. Go figure!
So I set out to draw me/Paulina with more body, but not exactly the "more" the fat liberationists meant...
Note 1: her skin is so orange because a flashbulb was used for fill against the low sun, and I wanted to be true to the photo, aside from my minor alteration.
Note 2: I wonder how you put on a swimsuit like this? Maybe I should have stuck to a simple, tasteful trikini.

CAT DANCER--1996 sculpture. Clay, coathanger, acrylic. 15". Chris Wayan.

I have recurring dreams of a feline familiar or anima who loves dance. At last, I tried sculpting her. Her figure's made of unfired clay--right at the limit of what raw clay can do. She has coat-hanger bones and acrylic paint for skin, which strengthens her some. I'm not totally satisfied with her stance--from some angles it feels more earthbound than I hoped.
But it's a miracle she can rear up at all. I mean, basically she's a lump of dirt--and she's DANCING. I intend to remember that the next time someone treats ME like dirt.
So what if i am? Dirt can dance.

BOYFRIEND OUT OF PHASE AGAIN
Sanford erasable crayon, 14x17", by Chris Wayan
This started from seeing someone stretch in my dance class--she looked like she was making love to the air. At home, I sketched her from memory, and suddenly her lover appeared: a black wolf. She got a bit shaggy herself and I finally realized she was a werewolf too, just a bit out of phase... Some relationships are like that.

BLUE MER-ANGEL, 2000, CHRIS WAYAN, CERAMIC SCULPTURE

A frontal view, with spread wings.

BLUE MER-ANGEL. Ceramic sculpture, 11.5" long, by Chris Wayan, 2000.
Yes, she's clay; by far the most delicate ceramic I've done. Her wings are white clay, which shrinks a bit differently from the red clay of her body, so I blended them near the shoulders--still expected an explosion in the kiln. In fact I'm amazed she survived the sculpting process before firing--the wings would crack at a touch.
Don't ask me how she gets anything done with no hands. How do dolphins get things done?
By not needing to get things done?

BASEBALL NAGA - A childhood dream, sketched years later.
I'm riding a miniature train across the lawns of a city park, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, near the Nevada border. The Sierra peaks around us are snowcapped, but down here by the lake, at only 2000 meters, it's a hot summer day. Sprinklers arc glassily over the verdant lawn, and the track runs under the spray and rainbows. Riding the toy train, on the seat across from me, are two members of our softball team. One is a girl I've seen on the Tahoe beaches. She's wearing her team cap--and nothing else. Her friend is a talking snake, a Naga. I wonder how he throws the ball? He wears a team cap too. A mild, playful character, he obviously adores her. Flirting and teasing, he yells "EEEEEEK" when the train carries them under the sprinklers. "I better go in where it's warm" he says, and crawls into her lap, between her thighs, nuzzles her crotch, teasing her lips apart. His cap falls off as he squeezes inside her. She spreads her legs with a gasp and looks around, her face blushing red as a sunburn as more and more sun-heated snake slides inside her, cold little jets from the sprinkler trickling down her back and belly. Her friend turns around inside, and slips his head out... "You're so nice and warm!" he says, and tickles her till she comes, laughing, and I wake.

BANANA MOON 1998 ACRYLIC 3x4'
San Francisco City College, where I paint, has a diverse student body. Okay, not THIS diverse, I exaggerated a bit. The artists here all see themselves in the model of course--artists in my experience always do. It's amazing how much pictures look like their painters, not their subjects!
Why the banana? Art departments in American colleges are usually broke; the cash goes to technology and business, the proper American pursuits. Studio props are cheap or improvised. Bananas for moons.
Besides, the model appears largely human--and anthropoids are famous for craving bananas, using tools to reach for them. Reach for the moon...

Digitally touched-up pencil sketch, by Chris Wayan.
On and off, I've been dreaming and doodling the wordless story of a nomadic tribe of wildly varied human/horse crossbreeds, not just 'taurs but strange beings like this frustrated unfortunate who lacks hands. He popped out one day when I was feeling helpless about something, and has been haunting me since. No hands...

THE ARTIFACT WAS HOT
paper and felt pen, 14 x 17", by Chris Wayan
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves."
A dream I had long ago. Inside the dream, I didn't recognize the artifact we'd found was a broken part of a phone. The civilization I was excavating, a million years from now, was humanity's. I hope this isn't our future. If we have to go like the dinos, let it be an honorable comet, and not this. Not each other.

ANDROMEDA. 1988, Erasable crayon, 11x14", Chris Wayan.
In Greek myth, Andromeda was a princess chained to a sea-rock, to appease a dragon. Perseus rescued her.
I dreamed I met that dragon, before he flew to her. He wasn't what I expected. Part sea-serpent, part man--or rather, men. For like Frankenstein, he had been... created, stitched together, made of four quadrants: thoughts, senses, feelings, and intuitions. The monster was that rarity, a WHOLE PERSON--even if his seams showed. He spoke in a lean dark voice full of poetry, of the need for balance between darkness and light...
And Andromeda, the maiden chained to the rock? She was another! Maiden and monster were the same species. No need for a human hero to rescue her! The dragon himself would unchain her: he sought a mate, not meat.
Only... did she know that? Did she know her own strength?

Early digital picture (1991!), only 16 colors.
I dreamed I was in the New York loft of an artistic cat family. Tigers among cement columns... Their eldest kitten was a black ballerina panther. I loved her at first sight, but I was too shy to ask her out. This picture is to remind me to SPEAK UP NEXT TIME!
Her mom, a lioness, reminded me of Sigourney Weaver. We all went fishing with energy lines... for the Sun, a small fireball swimming through the loft like a golden carp.
The next day, a friend dragged me to "Ghostbusters II". It had New York lofts, fishing for glowing objects with energy lines, and Sigourney Weaver becoming a big cat! My dream was on screen--scrambled, but clearly predictive.

LEONINE TRIPLE GODDESS:
Once a goddess in a dream told me to seek three and only three things in a mate: she had to want me as much as I wanted her, she had to be warm-hearted, and she had to be brilliant--no matter how weird. Then she added "...and if you can't find me in one person, find me in three. But find me." I got very nervous. Guilty. I'm too shy for communes and group marriages!
Yet in dreams, I keep meeting three goddesses and find to my surprise that I'm comfortable living with them. So I keep visualizing them, and painting them when I dream them, and try to get my day-heart used to the idea. Here, they're tiger-strong: they just built a universe.