I dreamt bees made sweet honey from my past failures. The title is a paraphrase of a line from Spanish poet Antonio Machado's famous poem, Last Night As I Was Sleeping. The full stanza reads (in a translation by Robert Bly):

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

The six works in this exhibition each in their own way embody the spirit and revelation of Machado's theme, that new life, creativity itself, can be seen as an aqueduct cut through the stubborn ground by false starts, exploration and learning from mistakes. Layering, revision, and a broad-faced version of painting pentimento (Italian for repentance) play a formal as well as a narrative role in all of these large-scale paintings, resolving into bold and assured images. Los Angeles painters Charles Arnoldi and Jacob Melchi match up with Bay Area painters David Becker, Jenny Bloomfield, Linda Geary, David Maxim and Ann Harrold Taylor to present the fruits of marvellous errors.