ALLYGUALT and AUGHUPY EATGUST: The Birthday Nightmares of Chester G. “Petey” Dahleigh

FORWARD and TEXT By Lucat D. Sobtactz

Chet G. "Petey" Dahleigh’s “sleep paintings” rarely concerned a particular theme or event. They were melanges and collages of themes - militarism, domesticity, courtship, excessive airplane traffic, iincorrectly assembled dogs. But in the summer of 1958 he seemed obsessed with birthdays. He had just completed a series of ads for an insurance company, done in his usual style.

The Birthday motif ran through all the sleep-paintings he created in August of that year. Was it because he had turned three score and ten, the Biblical allotment?

In this work, the age is mutated and obscure, and the celebrant seems to prefer it that way.

This next work is less complacent. The celebrant - wearing an Uncle Sam hat now, not a pointed party hat - is petulant about the event.

Behind him we see a some people who were later identified. On the left is Dahleigh's teacher at the art academy, who famously said that his pupil would never amount to anything. Dahleigh vowed that he would "show him what's what some day," and indeed he sent the professor a framed copy of his first advertising commission. (Technically, he wrapped it around a bat and beat him unconscious in his driveway.) The other man on the left is thought to be Joe "Cobweb" Carter, who was convinced that the corner of every room he ever entered had exactly one medium-sized spider.

There is also a bird from a Bosch painting.

A similar work dated from the next day. We seem to have caught a gangster in a contemplative mood, perhaps regretting that he'd just whacked a guy who had a small kid, and he thought it would be decent to bring a cake. Or he just stole the cake from a child so he could light his cigarette.

Older men leer from the margins with false smiles, happy that youth is being consumed in the flame of time. The dog is perhaps a childhood memory, but the man does not look at it. If the dog died when the man was 2, he would not remember him. But we know the dog remembers.

In fact, that’s what Peterson called this work: The Dog Remembers. Many of the sleep paintings had a title or comments scrawled on the back, but it was written in a cipher, and for years no one could decode the words. In 1987, however, I noted something: the capital letters A, I, M, T, and O were all reversed. Was it possible that Dahleigh had written everything backwards? Indeed, that’s what he did. And so I was able to unlock the meaning of the works he had thus described.

The fourth work in the series moves to the city, where Dahleigh’s taberau is characteristically energetic. Everyone has the same over-performing glee, except for the dog in the taxi, who has the outlines of a dream-creature seen only in the margins of vision, constantly shifting. The detail that has haunted art historians for years is the red-headed comic-relief sidekick who has been trapped in the columns of a calendar.

Dahleigh's notes on the back:

I'm the Face Fixer, Timmy. When you are back from war I will fix your face. I will fix your face so good

In this bright work, the man - or "Bertinday Boy" - seems indifferent to the patriotic light-bulb hanging in the air. (But the dog remembers.) The lightbulb gives no illumination - does that mean that American ideals have lost their power to inspire? Are they outshone by a candle that has the power of the sun, suggesting that pagan ideas will replace the red-white-and-blue ethos?

Dahleigh's notes on the back:

They insisted they’d been “getting into the party mood” so it would be more fun when he came home from work. He’d humor them for a while. But not much longer.

Dahleigh note:

A raise would be nice but the boss just dropped a mouse at his feet now and then as if that meant something

Some of the works clearly indicate that the sponsors of his work would occupy his subconscious as well.

"Lirs! WET is a Lur Inairene Afvaritancs!" This line cannot be translated, only repeated until you believe its sentiment with intense certainty.

Another example of the Insurance commission haunting his sleep-work:

Is Dahleigh addressing the matter of immigration affecting actuarial tables, and hence the rates paid by people in particular areas of the country?

Dahleigh note:

He’d gone all in on his prediction that the national mascot would be renamed Uncle Mustard, and he wasn’t going to budge

The quizzical nature of the mummy-man's head-sticks, reminscent of the arrows that hang from a bull after the toreodor has inflicted a dozen stabs, indicates that he does indeed confess to being a Wit Wham Nob. Guilty as charged.

Dahleigh note:

Greco-Roman cat-cake sculpting was a bygone skill, but some still knew the old ways

The final entry in this series is simply titled SLPH GORPTRATE

The meaning of those words have not been revealed.