Symphony and other Dreams: Really, we're all a cast of players all come together from different backgrounds, different viewpoints, different life experiences, different states of mind, different emotional states, all trying to perform this Symphony. For me painting is about the bigger question of "why are we here?", "where are we going?” Though I confess sometimes I wonder if the answer isn't simply that we're just hurtling through the darkness together. Some of us are playing through our lives in modes of victory and success and then others are working through it in failure and suffering ...and some of us just have our heads down and we're trying to do the work. But I think that no matter where we are, or what we're going through - we're all in it together trying to play out the full expression of our human existence. I think it's amazing that there's so much we can find in a single life: we can find failure, we can find victory, we can embody devotion, we can embody belligerence, we can be fools, or we can be brilliant. When I paint and think about paintings, I think about dreams ... what it feels like to be in a dream. To me, a painting is about seeing the world through the lens of that dream. I love dreams. Dreams are a place where we surrender to this strange mode of existence made up of our hopes and fears, and curiosities, and our pain, and our love. Carl Jung would say that everybody in our dream is really an expression of our self ... they're embodying some aspect of our inner psyche, even if they feel they're the opposite of who we feel we are. I hope that we can achieve a true and deep feeling of empathy and compassion for each other, and that we can see ourselves in others, and we can see others in ourselves. - Noah Buchanan