ARTS Artist of Dreams Jesse has been splashing watercolors onto paper for almost six decades. He’s still laboring with love to show us through dream pictures the mystical and magical nature of the universe. May 2007

Jesse Allen

My name is Jesse Patrick Allen. I originally began painting as a rebellion against my family. I was a musically untalented person living in the midst of a family of gifted musicians. My stepfather was a virtuoso violinist, and my mom and half-sister both possessed musical abilities.

I felt left out, so when I was 13 years old, during a period of enforced inactivity while recovering from a case of chicken pox, I began doing some sketching and drawing with crayons of medieval scenes on small pieces of paper.

My godfather saw what I had done and exclaimed with great enthusiasm, “O Jesse! You must learn to be a painter.”

My godfather acted upon his convictions, bought me a good set of water-based paints, and life was never the same for me again. From the beginning painting was more passion than a pastime. With that box of watercolors I began painting during every free moment.

At the Beginning

I was born in Nairobi, Kenya on March 11, 1936. During my childhood at various times I lived in Kenya, England, Ethiopia, and Uganda.

I was raised as a part of an elite minority in countries inhabited by a polyglot society consisting of Greeks, Armenians, Czechs, Poles, Scandinavians, Indians, and Pakistanis. And, of course, there were Africans representing a number of tribal groups.

At one time I attended a boarding school and roomed with 140 boys representing ten different language groups. Back in those days no Africans ever went to school with us, of course. They were very poor.

My family was relatively well off because my dad was an official high in the ranks of government. He also had close contacts with African nationals and became blood brother to an important seer from the Masai tribe. I lived and moved among Africans with complete freedom.

My father had trained Ethiopian freedom fighters during the war as part of the local resistance against the Italian occupation. In that way he became familiar with the men who would become the leaders of the country. Father eventually went to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, and became Commissioner of Police under the emperor Haile Selassie.

My parents separated following a bitter divorce when I was five years old. I attended a different boarding school every year until I was 12 and lived in a different foster home during each holiday.

Life was not difficult; the people I lived with were kind and gentle to me. My style of life did encourage a solitary existence, however, which prepared me for the life of an artist. Even more importantly, such a life equipped me to live alone and to be responsible for my own emotional wellbeing.

I always had a gift for languages. I grew up speaking Swahili and English and learned Latin and French in those boarding schools. I graduated in 1954 from the Prince of Wales School near Nairobi, which at that time was one of the world’s great schools, and then attended the University at Oxford, where I studied French and Italian.

While at Oxford I began painting seriously. My artistic passions kicked into high gear when I took a student vacation trip to Venice, Italy. I was completely overwhelmed by the magnificence of the art that I saw everywhere — including enormous paintings larger than a barn.

Following graduation I spent a few years in Milan teaching English and took my painting to another level. After moving to America I took a position as an instructor teaching Italian and French at Stanford University.

Getting Serious About My Art

I continued my painting activities and in 1963 conducted my own ad hoc exhibition on the large enclosed front steps of the Stanford library.

My art always had psychedelic qualities and I was painting fantastic images using brilliant colors before drugs came along to make these so popular. A generation of students in the 60s was able to appreciate those surreal figures and luminous colors. So many people gathered to look at my paintings that people had difficulty getting into and out of the library.

Mounting an art show on the steps of a public building seems like a chaotic thing to do by today’s standards, but this was 1963 — the year that Ed Sullivan asked the question, “Who the hell are the Beatles?” And John F. Kennedy was killed.

Everyone was challenging normal patterns of conduct. Bob Dylan was writing “Masters of War.” Martin Luther King was telling us that he had a dream.

My life changed with that show. Something clicked in my heart and I knew what I wanted to be. I had discovered my destiny. So at the age of 28 I made an irrevocable decision to retire from teaching languages at Stanford and to pursue my art.

It was either a courageous or stupid thing to do. I had a good degree. I was a popular teacher respected by my peers and admired by my students. I was paid a good salary with retirement benefits, but chasing my dreams of art fulfilled the real longings of my soul. Art had become obsession; I was being driven to express the things going on inside me.

Elements of My Style

When I started painting full-time I did some oil on canvas but always found the medium to be difficult. My landlady complained about the smell. With watercolors, on the other hand, I don’t have to think so much about the mechanics behind the process of creation. There are no solvents to contend with or drying times to be considered.

My art was self-taught. I have observed the masters, and others have given me some help, but my techniques and style are basically home grown.

My paintings all begin with a drawing. I then cover the surface with layers of washes, often laying them down in a series of concentric circles that build upon one another to flood the picture with life, light, and feeling.

I practice economy as part of my style and never create preliminary sketches. Everything eventually gets finished. I never throw anything out. No false starts. I can change objects that I draw, but can’t erase or discard them.

The Primitiveness style of my art embraces such concepts as irrationality, kinship with nature, freedom, sexuality, a proclivity to violence, mysticism, et cetera. But my art is not naive. I’m not doing folk art because my works are full of calculation and curves. I consider with great care the relationships between every line and object.

My paintings include bright colors, decoration, and obsession with detail. Easily recognizable objects are depicted in an abstract representational fashion. My works blur the boundaries of nature. Plants and trees become animal-like in my paintings, and animals take on human characteristics.

Plants are important in my life and in my art. I’ve had an orchid in my home for a number of years. It has personhood; it speaks to me.

My paintings include a lot of circles because of the perfection of the shape. Circles are infinite, without beginning or end. The beautiful ornaments in our skies, the sun and moon, are circles.

In some of my paintings circles are abstractions of beings; they might depict the soul of a person, animal, or even a plant. I sometimes carry the circle outside the picture because some of my artwork is itself round or looping, At other times the paper is of indefinable shape. I’ve rebelled against always painting inside a rectangle. It’s too confining. I sometimes like to set my paintings free!

This Is My Art

My vision is to paint a dream of the sacredness of the universe — not to paint the universe itself, but a dream of the thing. The reality is depicted in the same way that dew forming on grass will outline the shape of the grass.

I view the universe as arranged on a spectrum with progression from material, to energy, to intellect, and finally to spirit. The region of spirit is the world that I inhabit with my artwork. In my art, as in dreams, the universe of the psyche and the waking world meet and exchange experiences.

Dream, drama, and trauma are three interconnected concepts in my art. I picture violence as both beautiful and terrible, since the universe is always bringing into existence the grotesque and the sublime. I’ve had a life-long fascination with insects, which seem to me to perfectly embody these characteristics.

I paint in a Shamanic dream world populated by spirits that impart disguised messages and experiences. The earth is alive in my paintings with an animist-type personification of natural objects.

My paintings point to the fact that we are all a part of a whole and only in our perceptions do we cut ourselves off from the universe around us. I’ve had many experiences of dreams and altered states of consciousness, when the boundaries fell away.

My paintings are intended for meditation, and that’s the quality that calls to people. I attract the viewer’s attention as the blossom draws a hummingbird. My paintings are messages to the human soul from a human soul, eye, and hand, regarding the spiritual wonder of nature.

Meditation-prone people “get it” when they gaze at one of my pictures. Materialists, on the other hand, sometimes wonder why, for example, there are two suns in one of my skies, together with a moon. Or why a lion has red splotches. They miss the point.

The fact is that I intend my paintings to be viewed as dreams. I fuse animal and human physiologies. I sometimes create humanoid lions or leonine humans. Some of my animals look like they were humans dressed in costumes.

The ocean is the unconscious soul in my paintings. Whales rising to the surface of a fantastic sea represent great unacknowledged emotions that people might be only aware of in dreams, which are gone upon waking, but leave behind a residue of the vast sentiment.

Every tree is a type of the Tree of Life symbolizing the evolution of the world with roots extending beneath the ground and branches lifting into the sky.

The tooth and claw form another important aspect of my paintings just as they are a part of the terrible beauty of the universe.

I remained obsessed by my art. My first act upon waking in the morning is to see what happened to my paintings overnight. They seem to have a life of their own; they appear different in the morning than in the shadows of the previous evening.

My life has been devoted to daily acts of creation. I continue to experience many sacred instants, and shall go on doing so until I die and enter the afterworld. I have no children to continue my name, but in their absence I’m leaving the world something to carry on the memory of my existence.

You can see my work on exhibit at the Arts Commission Gallery in the Brentwood Technology Incubator, 101 Sand Creek Road from May through July. You can meet me personally at a reception that will be held May 2, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Perhaps we can spend a few moments dreaming together.

That would be nice!