One Night I Dreamed

“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and went out and bought the materials to begin it,” Jasper Johns has been quoted saying for decades.

Well, last night I dreamed I destroyed a large painting, and the sound of the scraping of the painted surface woke me up the next morning, and I was horrified at having done it, and it seemed like an Agnes Martin painting, but in other moments it was the craggy surface of Jasper Johns’s Fragment of a Letter bronze I was peeling off, except that was all part of the dream, too, and then I got up and blogged the draft to begin it.

impressions of jasper johns's hands making sign language alphabet gestures that spell his name cast in a larger field of bronze, a detail from a 2009 work titled, fragment of a letter
detail from Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2009, bronze, via Matthew Marks Gallery

Somehow maybe the Jasper Johns ASL works I’d fallen asleep trying to write about collided with the paintstripping reels I get served on instagram.

a screenshot from my instagram of a paint scraping video showing a white wood panel door with the paint surface all buckled and cracked from being covered in paint stripper, and a hand starting to scrape the paint away to reveal a dark mahogany finish underneath
Screenshot

And I can’t tell if the Agnes Martin connection was her destructive tendencies or her geometry:

agnes martin painting is mostly brown with a faint grid of horizontal lines and dashes across its entire surface, titled white flower, at the guggenheim
Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960, oil on linen, 72 x 72 in., collection Guggenheim Museum

Or if the geometry was actually Caillebotte’s Raboteurs,

gustav caillebotte's best painting, the floor planers, or les raboteurs, in french, is three shirtless white guys on their knees scraping varnish of a wood floor in a 19th century french salon, with light pouring in from french doors heh on the back wall, causing the floor and their shoulder muscles to glow a bit, the angle of the perspective and the compressed composition gives the sense of the artist standing in the room and watching the scene, which he probably was

which, while it would be a sultry dream, might actually be part of the waking up flailing to explain the jagged scraping . Which did not, upon fully awake reconstruction, sound like actual paint scraping, à la Gerhard Richter’s squeegees. But which, I suspect, was actually my own intermittent snoring, which could also explain the repeated sense I’d had that I’d woken up when I had not, or had not quite.