The art of Mitch Barrett

The Dreams of Frankie Cameron is a story about the struggle between the ego of the artist, the mask that we all wear and the source of his true creation, his soul connection to God. With an upcoming exhibition in Paris and a lack of inspiration and productivity, pressure is soon put on him by an art dealer to quickly come up with something new, as his reputation and that of the gallery are at stake.

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SYNOPSIS
Frankie Cameron is a relatively successful artist living in Paris, He isn’t famous and believes that despite all his work and ability, he hasn’t achieved the recognition he would have liked. He wants more recognition, to have celebrity status and fears becoming almost ignored and forgotten after he has died. Also he lacks inspiration to create new paintings and with financial pressure, needs to produce more work to exhibit. He is certainly willing to compromise his ideals to get the results that he wants and becomes desperate for a quick fix.

His girlfriend Tsuki, with a blossoming career as a fashion model is soon recognised as a celebrity. Whilst she is on a fashion shoot in the Amazon, Frankie asks her to bring back with her some ‘Ayahuasca’, taken from a plant in the Rain Forest and known to the indigenous people there as ‘vine of the Soul’. He hopes that this hallucinogenic drug would be what he needs to trigger his inspiration.

Tsuki returns with a more developed compound of ayahuasca in the form of a white powder. Frankie after experiencing the drug with Tsuki, wants to increase the dosage and whilst still under its influence, accidentally mistakes it for a similar bottle of a mysterious white powder pigment that he had picked up from an old shop and had intended to use in his paintings. Whilst Tsuki sleeps and believing it to be the ayahuasca compound that he had previously used, he takes the drug and dreams.

The next morning he finds the dream materialised into reality as a painting. Frankie takes more of this potent white powder and finds that more of his dreams have become paintings. They are paintings that have been created on blank canvases without him even having to touch a paintbrush. With his increase in creative productivity, with a promising exhibition and his paintings selling rapidly, his popularity as an acclaimed artist also escalates.

Tempted by his desires, he has an affair with Sephone, the beautiful wife of Oscar Sata, a famous fashion designer that has commissioned him to paint her. Through Sephone, Frankie is enticed into the society of Oscar Sata, that becomes a world of corruption and desires, manipulated and the manipulator in a parade of addictions.

With the growing demand for his new paintings, Frankie soon becomes addicted to the drug. Illusion, reality and time become distorted as a world of dark dreams and nightmares flood into his daily life.

Tsuki also inadvertently finds the white powder and mistakes it for the ayahuasa , she overdoses and kills herself. Burdened with guilt, Frankie becomes obsessed with a belief that he can bring her back from his dark world of dreams. He consumes even more of the drug, which takes him on a twisted journey to the hidden depths of a hideous self.

In his Underworld of dreams, he follows a path through to a Labyrinth of chambers, with each of the chambers representing one of his seven sins and displayed in his paintings. With both worlds reflected in each other and in his search in his dreams for Tsuki, he comes across Lilith, which leads him to the darkest side of himself.

Sephone persuades him to also add the powder to his paintings, convincing him that it would influence more people to buy his work, so that they would become addicted to his paintings and want to buy them at any price. She realises how potent the drug is in changing perspective of what a person sees and in altering their senses; Sephone then convinces Frankie to allow her husband Oscar Sata, to experiment by using the powder within the textiles of his fashion designs and creating real fashion addicts.

With Frankie Cameron granted fulfilment of his desires, power, fame and materialistic wealth, the powder takes over his life. Illusion and reality, even time becomes distorted and finally he is committed to an insane asylum. His only salvation is Tsuki’s sister, Satori and her little daughter Sakura.

It is a story of conflict between the Ego and a search for his Soul, about the duality that is within us all.

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Dangerous Dreams is a work in progress, therefore some of the scenes in the story have been completed, some scenes a brief paragraph or just the title, some sketched along with notes, along with some of the images to the story.