Sean McCandless has brandished his brush to bring you an arty contribution, based around, ‘Artists make Poor Businessmen.’ This is the first of his three entries.

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He dreamt of Vincent

On his nightstand were two books, a flashlight, a picture of his Grandmother, a radio (not a clock radio), a quartz crystal shard, his wallet, sunglasses, an embroidered leather bracelet, an expired bus transfer, his passport, a little toy car, an overturned miniature baseball helmet filled with change, hair ties, a red lighter, a wedding invitation to a wedding he wouldn’t be able to attend, a small memo pad, a pen made of myrtle wood, small buttons from his friend’s band, a wooden key chain from a far off land, two polished amethysts, a commemorative pin from a city’s unsuccessful Olympic bid, and a scattering of business cards he had collected over the last long while.

The books were the last things he had touched before going to bed that night.  If you would measure how important an object was by how recently it was touched, the books would be the most important things to him on the table. By the same measurement, the least important things would be the business cards.

The books were Dear Theo, a book from his Grandmother’s collection that comprised of letters written by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, and a paperbound literary journal from France called Van Gogh’s Ear, which, this month, had a digital rendition of Marilyn Monroe on the cover. He had read a little from each before sleeping, and in his dream were the small rooms and studios of Vincent’s description, with clear light coming in from the North through a window with clean, white linen curtains. There was a chair and a table close up against the Western wall, a small mattress stuffed with hay in the next room to the East, paintings on all the walls, and an easel straight ahead in front of him. But in the middle of the canvas on the easel, there was a vibrating object, strong and disturbing in its emanations, with crimson and black outlines prickling and moving around a complex, flushed and pale collection of whites and pinks with undercurrents of yellows, greens and browns. Like the Sacred Heart of Mary, it burned through dimensions and time, and as he walked towards it, he saw it, a severed left ear, jagged and bleeding, coursing and shining, both living and dying. As his vision zoomed closer and closer, a sense of dread, terrifying beauty and pain warped everything around him and sent shivering, other-worldly anguish up through his nostrils and into his brain, infecting his whole body and purifying his senses. The small shapes of curving pink cartilage, shading black as they turned around and around inside of themselves, they drew him in, as if to whisper: “Eat me. I am all you will ever be,” as the vision of a saintly, orange-haired Vincent reposed serenely just above.

In his dream then, he slowly looked up from the ear and the canvas, following the shoulders, head and eyes of the poor old master upward, upwards towards the window, which was open now with white linen curtains flapping wildly. He looked upwards more, attempting to see, to make contact with the Angel Vincent, who was rising steadily along with his eyes, as if he were not in space at all, but actually housed in the upper half of this dreamer’s field of vision. He now looked up over the top of the canvas, and out of the window, where the sun was now looming, giant, shining from the North, and as he slowly chased the Artist’s image upward, it merged with the sun, disappearing in the giant disc’s shining, burning light that quickly turned everything to white and swelled to fill everything there was.

He awoke. He wondered what the dream meant. He consulted his tarot cards, he scribbled in his journal, he called his friends, he stared blankly out of a window, he scoured a dream dictionary, he clawed at a guitar, he splattered paint on a canvas, he did an interpretive dance, he composed several poems, he screamed for five minutes straight, he imagined how it would look as a performance, he planned his next escape to a far off land, he telephoned his grandmother, he burned the images in his brain, he stomped on the ground, he pleaded with the heavens, he ate beans and rice, he read a book and he went to bed.

And the business cards gathered dust on his nightstand.

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Stay tuned to this frequency because we have other fine entries to follow, in the days to come.

Plus, a new contest started up on July 15^th – details here:

www.awordwithyoupress.com/2010/07/15/a-dish-called-wanda-our-new-contet/

And don’t forget our mystery Brit prize contest, running until July 31^st – someone must win… something!

www.awordwithyoupress.com/2010/07/04/we-hold-this-contest-to-be-self-evident/