I'd been saving up a sweet piece of cardboard, with some unique manufacturing graphics for an interesting painting. Finally the idea hit me to capture one of my favourite song lyrics. James Taylor's classic, "Fire and Rain" is hauntingly well-written tale of a friend's suicide, dealing with drug addiction and with fame and features the line "sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground".  Though in his case it refers to his old band the Flying Machines breaking up, the metaphor is a powerful one.

I choose to use the canvas vertically to represent the difference between a fiery old-fashioned biplane crash on the ground and the dreamy clouds in the sky. Other than that, I wanted to weave in some type, while using colours and textures and images in an experimental manner, to capture the melancholy of the song. I maintained some of the original cardboard imagery, for texture, and because the ladder kind of ties in...a high/low connection.