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.

All artists and creative folk eventually come face-to-face with the nightmarish scenario of a blank page and no thoughts to fill it with. A solution to this lack of timely inspiration, that I came up with many years ago, is the geometric analysis doodle. Basically, you just look around, and start drawing everything you see in the room you're in. Electrical wires, lamps, dressers, stereo components...anything will do. Just get yourself drawing, and feel the pen on the page. The trick to this stream of conscious doodling, is to reduce everything down to it's basic forms, patterns, and shapes. Try to keep most of your lines straight, using only the occasional curve. It turns out to be a bit of a lesson in industrial design. With layering different shapes on top of each other, you add depth and visual interest, and produce some intriguing results.

I always thought some of these doodles would make a cool painting, transferring them over from line art, to colour fills. Though painting flat colours in hard-edged shapes, is a far-cry from something I would list as fun for me, after years of procrastination, I finally sat down and painted one.