I woke up this morning with an image imprinted in my brain. It was the last visualization of a dream that felt deep and profound and of which I had no memory of, save this unusual photograph of the mind.
I was standing in a desert, looking out at a distant hill of bronze-colored sand. The slope was filled with movement. Horses with riders were galloping toward me.
I had a sense that the scene unraveling before me was warlike, yet I knew that it wasn’t war. What I did know—what I felt—was that somehow, this moment was art, and I, as an artist, had to capture it with my mind’s eye.
It occurs to me now, in the waking hours of the late morning when streaks of sunlight beam through my window, and the scent of coffee lingers in the air, that this dream was a metaphor of our common crisis, the battle we are all waging together as a human race.
My subconscious was telling me to document these times, to record these moments now, while they permeate our lives. This obligation, this need, tugs on the shirttails of the painter, the photographer, and the poet, though they don’t know why. Is it to preserve our past so we never forget, or so we can learn from it, or so we can tell this story to generations to come? Perhaps this yearning, what drives the artist, is in all of us, and is as human as coming together to fight a common foe.
