Lebbird at "moonrise"

The truth, of course, is that this lebbird is ON a moon, and the "moon" rising is a gas giant some 2000 times more massive than her homeworld, Tharn. Though small, Tharn has deep trenches and craters where the air is dense enough to let large creatures fly--but also large uplands where they can't. So this species inhabits only the local equivalents of Mariner Canyon or Hellas Basin on Mars.

Lebbird reading (instead of minding the milk-monkeys)

A Tharnian lebbird neglect her flock for a book. Many modern lebbirds are ethical vegetarians (high-protein ones, heavy on dairy products from herds of domestic milk-monkeys, plus bird- and lizard-eggs), but then, half them declare fish is a vegetable. What is it about sushi, anyway?
The puzzled brown things in the brush are milk-monkeys. Yes, that's how it translates. Never mind how you milk a monkey; you really don't want to know.
The round object is a book, like all books on Tharn; rectangles are a human obsession.

Lebbird up a tree

Tharnian lebbirds are social, easy-going, slow to anger, and reluctant to fight, due to their light bones and delicate wings. As sensual as leopards, they excel in dance, bodywork, seduction, sex, scents and herbs. Actors, dancers, musicians. Intensely curious, they make good therapists, shamans, and scientists--all fields with complex, multidimensional puzzles, like flying through the canopy lebbirds evolved in. With hunter's eyes, visually attuned to motion, they readily visualize changes over time; lebbirds invented calculus.

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.

MANATEE -- a digital poster by Chris Wayan
Beauty's link to status and privilege bothers me.
Beauty's a shadow economy, in which attractive people, creatures, trees, flowers, even rocks or landforms are designated "rich" in beauty, and get perks (or parks)... while the rest of us uglies, get eaten, beaten, paved, enslaved... or just, like the manatees, run over.

MOA -- erasable crayon, 11x14", 1995, by Chris Wayan.
I dreamed was a heron with knee problems. Nagging aches. I did heron yoga but it didn't work.
So at last I went to seek my big brother, the Moa, in the Egyptian desert. Moas were huge, fierce birds on New Zealand, who humans killed off a thousand years ago. But my brother, being smart, emigrated and lay low...
He gave me some advice which may apply to certain humans as well as herons...

PORTRAIT OF MOZDOC by Chris Wayan 2002.
My first commissioned piece for VCL. It was fascinating to compose such a complex, quirky character--we're talking a chain of 500 torsos, here! Imagine what his sofa must have cost.
Yeah, I do commissions. I especially like to do images that are dreamlike, sexy, funny, and/or romantic.
Character copyright Mozdoc, interpretation copyright me. Are we all protected now?

NIGHT FLIGHT -- About 11 x 17", by Chris Wayan. I hope the gold shows up... it's acrylic and gold paint over an ink drawing Xeroxed to enlarge and waterproof it.
This is a tribute to my late friend Catherine. She was a rider, crazy about horses. She dreamed she was a flying mare with golden hooves--a problem, since everyone was after them, and she was, well, rather attached to them.
I'd had almost identical dreams, so I painted a sort of hybrid of our flights in the dark, when the gold-prospectors can't see...
Her dream was prophetic in a way. A while after she told it to me, she was injured, and could no longer dance, or run, or play sports, or, most important for her, fly on her beloved horses.
She killed herself.
She'd lost her magic hooves. And they meant that much.

There's No Place Like Home, by Chris Wayan 2002.
I'm usually not into heels, they're hell on the ankles; but with four feet, they might be stable enough. But when I sketched it in pencil, I had no idea they'd be turn out to be the Ruby Slippers, or that Dorothy wasn't the only one to follow the Yellow Brick Road...

OWLOVERS, digital sepiatone by Chris Wayan
This image disturbs me a bit. In my art and in my life I'll freely mix sex with warmth, silliness, grief... But spookiness? And this does feel spooky to me.
Sexual abandon (as 19th century writers called it), when you let go till you're almost in a trance... do the owls embody that? Is that ferocious focus how carnivores can tear apart and swallow still-living things?
It's NOT some perverse comment on Patrice Kindl's OWL IN LOVE--wonderful book, but I read it AFTER I painted this...

Picnic in the Ruins, by Wayan, 2002.
Vaguely related to the illustrated story "Perissa's Reserved Seat", in the Stories folder. Not Perissa, but clearly a girl of the same species, and maybe from the same alternate-world beach town Perissa lived in, with old Roman ruins. The picture is from a rough pencil sketch, scanned, then gone over in Photoshop. This is stupid but... I like the bowl best.

PRAYER (WE SHALL BE REBORN) a picture-poem by Chris Wayan
Let's all sit around exploring obscene websites! Thus, instead of working hard for industry and growing rich and consumerish and riding around in a gas-hog car or particulate-spewing bus, we'll save the planet by staying in... nobly passive!
Hmm. Wait a minute! I don't cruise the web much myself, because it's not your life, it EATS your life, and yet... maybe it beats alcohol. And TV. Less cancer than tobacco...
Okay, let's be pro-porn. It's for the redwoods.

PUMA ORGY--14 x 19" crayon drawing of a dream, by Chris Wayan.
I was following the trail to the City of the Shining Spirits, to the west. It led over a sacred height, Black Rock; on its eastern shoulder, the path led through... the Animal Orgy.
Here, even the Ambassador from India, that modest woman in her blue sari, took off her clothes and inhibitions, and lay down with the Cougars and Cat People and California Girls...
I felt shy, but I had to do it... if I wanted to go on to the Shining City on the horizon... and I did.
So I cast off my sari and joined.
Only after I woke did my suspicious mind start hearing puns in "blue" and "sari." Now I know what I was truly invited to cast off, as a step on the sacred path.
Not just inhibitions... but the blues they bring.

RECOIL by Chris Wayan. An oldie: copyright 1995!
The girl on the left is me. I got so outraged about the gift of a perfectly nice levitating flower! For a while, as I painted it, I identified more with her animal familiar (on the right). I'd been sure she'd like that flower. Nope.
I felt so hurt and sorry for myself (whichever self I was) that I had to add the soul of Elvis behind us, conducting Heartbreak Hotel as background music... poor, poor me!
I found the painting quite bewildering at the time... but I spent the ensuing year freaking out from (un)buried memories of abuse. Now I think the flower may stand for those memories--and the picture, painted from instinct not logic, may have been warning me I was less ready than I thought to face the pain my body had carried so long.
The flower of ow, ow, ow.

REFLECTIONS IN THE POOL: 1
Pencil scene from a dream by Chris Wayan.
One night I found myself in a glass maze. In starlit mirrors, the faces of preachers and gym coaches mouthed contradictory commandments at me... Ignoring them, I wandered deeper, till at the maze's heart, I found a steaming pool. Chill fog slithered above and a few snowflakes fell. But I slipped naked into the water--and even as the snow fell, I was warm, in the riddle's core...
And then... I was not alone. She coalesced from a current. We made love, fused... and from us, from the pool's glowing depths and the reflections of the mirror-maze, flowed great cats and sphinxes, crowding out the preachers... till all was silence, all was magic, all was love.

REFLECTIONS IN THE POOL: 2
2nd of 2 pencil drawings of a dream by Chris Wayan.
...and in that luminous, breathable sea swam sphinxes and their kin: winged cheetahs, levitating leopards, tiger angels. They swarm and soar--wild, splendid, wise.
And then I freeze in horror. They're FIGHTING. The sphinxes ask riddles, and tear at any who go blank or err. Haven't they learned a thing in three thousand years?
Furious, I dive into the whirlwind--a devil among angels, with my black bat wings. They fear me, and I USE that. I force the fighters apart with a scornful riddle of my own: "Is THIS what you want? Is THIS all your beauty and wisdom and wings are for?"
They visibly wonder: "Devil? Man? But he questions like a sphinx!"
And then, in the wheeling melee, gliding on devil-wings, I turn my riddle on myself. "Harshly questioning your own motives all the time... aren't you guilty of inner war? Murder by riddle! Is that what YOUR genius is for?"
Why fight my own sphinx-nature? Let me challenge others, be a whole-hearted gadfly... and leave myself in peace.
As I shame (and thus save) the cat-angels, with my nagging, embarrassing questions... I suddenly can't help yelling to them all, "I love it! I LOVE this job!"
And wake.

SAMURAI MARE, dreamed 1993 by Chris Wayan
It's a sketch of a shamanic dream set in old Japan. My spirit wife, Silky, appeared as a mare, daring me to mount her... the picture tells the rest.
It was mouse-drawn using a paint program limited to 16 colors; it's meant to mimic the similar simplifications of 19th century woodblock prints.

Saurian: digital image by Wayan.
I've been having recurring dreams of this crested dinosaurian person, seven or eight feet tall, who's proud, strange, beautiful, and... kind of sexy.

SAVANNAD. Digital image by Chris Wayan.
The ancient Greeks knew dryads and naiads and oreads and nereids lived in trees and streams and mountains and seas, but who guarded meadows? I'm Californian, and our sunny grass hills feel sexy to me, full of a sprawling, sunbathing, sensuous energy, tawny and tan. Who are the spirits I sense? I don't know the Greek for grass or meadow or field, so for now I'll cheat and use the root savannah, which at least gets the idea across.

SEA OF TIME: digital sketch of a dream by Chris Wayan.
I dreamed I was drowning in the Sea of Time, where dragons thrashed black foam, and bits of worlds, and asked questions. PAINFUL questions. I said "What am I meant to do with my life? What should I contribute?"
My dragon said "Contribute? Go send checks to charities, and don't come back till you're ready to be honest about what YOU want." Oh, that hurt to hear...
Still, I recommend questioning dragons: for really useful pain is not all that easy to come by.

SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG COYOTE.
Acrylic on wood with sumi ink, gold leaf and dripped liquid bronze (both fake), paint chips and bubbles, 22.5" x 18" x 1" thick. By Chris Wayan 1999.
Just what it says. I'm more a dream artist than a realist, but I decided I needed practice in realism so one day I set up a mirror and painted myself, just to see...

Xiemeng: digital painting by Wayan, 2002. This is me as a cat getting back to some serious dreamwork. The red book's a dream journal, and the Chinese characters I just wrote on the air mean "Write dreams!" I'm not really evangelizing for shamanism, I'm nagging MYSELF to quit job-hunting so much and take time out to smell the flowers... and write my dreams. So I can date cat people in offline reality. Or be one. I don't care which. I'm just bored being human.
I started with a big round fuzzy Photoshop brush, and stuck with that till I got masses of light and dark and color that I liked. Then switched to a small custom brush that's a cloud of a dozen one-pixel dots. It gives a streaky effect good for fur. Background textures were mainly one flower-shaped custom brush.