EAST COUNTY DREAM CATCHER Showing to Others What Has Never Been
	NOVEMBER 2004

by Bill Carmel
Photos by Brad Shifflet

I began my artistic career painting in oils. I was following a passion that I had felt since my earliest memories because I discovered a desire for art in grade school. Later in high school I continued to pursue my bent for creating art in one medium or another.

I received an undergraduate degree in art and then went to graduate school in UC Berkeley where I received a Master of Fine Arts degree.

My taste in art is both varied and inclusive. There’s almost nothing about creating any kind of art that I don’t enjoy. While working on my studies at UC Berkeley, I made a decision to begin creating sculptures. This seemed a logical step in the progress of my art because I could see that my ideas in painting were becoming three-dimensional.

While still in undergraduate school I was commissioned to do a bust of Provost Kenneth Thimann, which is on display in the library at Crown College, UC Santa Cruz. I began the project as a portrait in oils, which turned into a bronze portrait. That was my first bronze casting and I received $37,000 for the job.

I entered a competition called California Design, which was part of a nation-wide contest. The first three prizewinners in each State were sent to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. My bronze and silver medicine spoon is on display at the Smithsonian today.

I have been making and painting sculptures ever since then, though I still do painting. I now create 2- and 3-dimensional art, sometimes both at the same time.

Hands, Heart, and Mind Together — and Separately
I like working with materials and enjoy constructing things. I greatly appreciate being able to use tools together with my bare hands while manipulating various media in different ways than by merely drawing and painting.

The tactile part of my sensory experience is extremely important to me. As I work with the materials it often happens that the idea only becomes mature in my mind through processes of constructing, fabricating, and manipulating the object itself.

I love being able to touch, bend, and mold materials. I especially like plastic media, such as clay and wax. Much of the time it doesn’t matter what I’m seeing and looking at, because my hands are doing what they know how to do seemingly without the intervention of my higher mental abilities.

In the same way, I often picture things in my mind without my eyes ever needing to see them. I was really good in mechanical drawing, for example, because I had the innate ability to see a drawing and then being able to flip it mentally so that I could see exactly what it would look like from another perspective.

This ability to change perspectives and viewpoints in my mind is important in my art. Many of my works are dream images. Being able to work with such images while not looking at the subject is really important because the subject doesn’t exist in the real world.

In developing a piece I will often combine various elements and parts of a story to create the object being viewed. Many of the constituent pieces of one of my works fit together to make a particular story belonging to the dream narrative.

I’m not concerned about whether the viewers understand my dream. Hopefully they will make a connection themselves between the objects they are looking at and memories and experiences from their own lives.

My artwork simply sets the stage for the dream story. Observers can bring whatever references and experiences they have themselves. I want them to complete the story itself only by identifying whatever meanings it has for them.

I maintain a dream journal, which becomes the basis of my artistic endeavors. The discipline of writing dreams down every day aids my mind in focusing on details that otherwise will quickly grow vague and indistinct in my memory.

The discipline of writing down my dreams also aids in training my mental faculties to more easily recall the visual and verbal elements in a dream sequence

I took a class in Santa Cruz from Dr. Calvin S. Hall, a student of Carl Jung. The dreams I’ve chosen to make into objects are “breakthrough dreams,” by which I mean that they are deep realizations of who I am which bring to the surface for a brief time a meaning or significance that was buried deep in my life but was never before brought to my conscious thought.

Dream a Little Dream With Me
I have vivid dreams both in black and white and in Technicolor. My dreams sometimes includes fields and patterns of color. Sometimes there are no objects only patterns of black and white, or color.

Animals in my dreams are guides that typically reveal often important but sometimes-mundane meanings.

In one dream, for example, I was walking on a beach by Humboldt State University and could hear sea lions barking and waves crashing on the shore. I could also hear the wind blowing and the waters of the Gold River running into the ocean.

The weekend before the dream, I had gone lobster catching with some friends. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” I thought in my dream, “if I could throw a trap into the water and catch some beautiful lobsters.”

I saw a pier in my dream and walking out on it, I saw a lobster trap, which I threw into the water.

Walking further down the beach I entered a cave and discovered a dolphin swimming around in a pool. The dolphin and I had a conversation about life and great meals. “I love to cook,” I told the dolphin. “Lobster is one of my favorite foods.”

“Go back down the pier and see if there is anything to eat,” the dolphin said.

I went back to my trap but from out from the water emerged a huge menacing lobster claw. I woke up in a state of panic.

I believe that the dream had a moral: One needs to be careful what one wishes for.

I’ve been working on a Dream series for three decades. More than 30 objects from this series are currently in private collections. One of them is on display in the City of New Orleans museum. Another large outdoor piece is on display at Laumier Sculpture Garden in St. Lewis.

Picturing Animals in Brass for Brentwood
I’ve done public art projects in Walnut Creek — in the “landscape portrait” series. A portrait of the Shell Ridge Open Space in the Walnut Creek Regional Center for the Arts. UC Santa Cruz; UC Berkeley.

The City of Brentwood has commissioned from me a series of sculptures for the new Veterans Park, adjacent to the Aquatic Park, at 1310 Balfour.

A series of footprints will lead to planters scattered around the area. The planters will contain life-size sculptures of native animals, including a coyote, raccoon, fox, egret, and a mallard duck.

My initial step was to complete the fox in oil clay. The Arts Commission was impressed enough to select me for the project.

The animals will be cast in dynamic poses. For example, the coyote might be pursuing a jackrabbit. The raccoon cleaning a crawfish. The fox might have a varmint under its foot. The egret might be eating a fish. The duck might be landing.

The animals will be naturalistic, as opposed to photo-realistic, cast in bronze. It is not easy to render fur or feathers in metal. The body will be generalized, and idetifiable by recognizable features.

The Lindsey Wildlife Museum in Pleasant Hill provides my resource for the animals. They have an animal hospital and museum displaying specimens of all the native animals, from insects through grizzlies. I was able to check out the specimens to use as models.

East County Haven for the Arts
Contra Costa County is a great place for an artist to live. The area is quieter, but somehow more authentic than most urban environments.

Many local Contra Costa County artists have spent decades creating interesting and beautiful works of art. They not only belong to our communities as a matter of simple longevity, but they often are active participants in the community life, joining municipal counsels and committees, and committing their time and energy to things like raising money for good causes.

Big city art networks, on the other hand, often seem composed of people with a more transient lifestyle. There is a different, more homely and less self-absorbed sensibility among the artists here in our county than you often find in the larger, more urban settings.

Many of the artists in Contra Costa County are pursuing other careers in order to earn survival money. They are sacrificing for their artistic passions and committed to art as a central life focus.

It seems fantastic to me that the City of Brentwood has the foresight to sponsor art programs and activities. In that way Brentwood residents are becoming active participants in generating and replenishing the creative energies that I can feel all around me in the beautiful region where we all live, work, and play.