Away by Mickey Dunigan San Juan Capistrano swallows Fluttering nervous in and out Corrugated chapel ruins, fly Away always at season end, After the tourists are gone: And we are gone, drawn toward Neurotic, hopeless waters, lashing The tidal shores of evening. We wander the aimless beach And finally, yards apart, I watch your watching. As the waves fold, unfold At your freshened feet, And the salt wind blows Your hair still more, We cannot see beyond The blackened shore's horizon. An unexpected wave eruption Sends us darting back To three dimension hours With dampened legs, a foot race To the car; for one sliced Moment. I forget migrations. The convergent ocean clarity Of pristine moments, together Huddled somewhere in a lifetime Fathom in my brain tonight, Caught in nomadic flight from winter. Creating New Ideas For Art I have been painting for a number of years, and I am very familiar with the steps taken to bring a painting to completion from visualized conception through preliminary sketches, underpainting, glazes, impastos, to the finished work. The procedures of technique and the mechanical processes in painting are fascinating in themselves, but in this paper I will concentrate on those vital, often-mysterious workings of the creative process, those procedures taken before any paint is applied to the canvas. Despite the influence of Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on completely spontaneous, unpremeditated work, the basic problems in most painting remains the choosing of a subject that can be aesthetically developed and that will stimulate both artist and viewer. I arrive at ideas for paintings by two basic methods: inspiration from within, based purely on imagination, and from without, based on nature, objective reality, or whatever else one chooses to call the non-imaginary world Of course, neither of these methods can be used in their pure forms, for imagination must be ultimately based on reality, and all art, however "realistic", is a transformation of nature by the artist. Nevertheless, these two methods are quite distinct. Now let me first discuss the role of imagination in arriving at ideas for paintings. Often these ideas seem to have an entirely spontaneous origin; I have mental images which are not prompted by any external stimulus, but apparently arise from some dark recess of my mind. These images may appear at any time, but they are most common just before I fall asleep or wake up, in that twilight zone between sleep and consciousness when dream and reality merge. I hesitate to call these images dreams, for they lack the action and continuity of "plot" found in dreams-proper; rather, they are generally evolving but static pictures-ideas. Usually these images are a synthesis of several thoughts that are topmost in my mind when I am somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. A rather absurd example of this fusion of thoughts was a visionary merging of Senator Moss and a stray cat. The relationship between these two very unlike beings naturally seems ridiculous, but at the time I experienced the vision it all seemed perfectly logical. Apparently through some kind of mysterious alchemy my subconscious had synthesized Moss and the cat into something that satisfied the rules of its weird system of logic. Certainly this example of spontaneous image could 15