Dan Rhema was a geologist who worked with international development organizations building housing and water projects, and living in various countries in Africa, South America and Mexico.

His training allowed him to teach people how to make bricks and building materials out of their natural local resources. His was a life dedicated to travel, social work and practical means to productive ends.

Then that Dan Rhema sort of . . . died.

After contracting Dengue Fever in Mexico, Dan suffered a brain injury so severe that he describes shooting out of his body and traveling toward a place of death. But he says that knowing his wife and three daughters were on this side, he decided he could not continue on that path and came back.

The Dan Rhema who moved through that second birth process remembers almost nothing of his life or work before the fever. This Dan rarely travels and leaves his house only on occasion. But what this Dan now does with his life is channel and create a vision of self- and archetypal imagery. A compulsion to extract dreams into sculpture and unique three-dimensional paintings has defined a new identity as a visionary artist.

“It’s like the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dan says, “where the guy starts making that shape out of mashed potatoes — Well, it’s like that with me and these dreams.”

And his studio is filled with work after work that reinterprets similar images . . . keys, circles, floating people. But as he looks around at his own creations, Dan says, “I don’t even remember making most of these.”

There has been no formal training, and Dan taught himself a kind of highly developed style of finger painting partly to express himself but mostly just to survive. But Dan says that only when his family was brought to Louisville to help train international workers did this expression turn into a real way of living.

“My life as it is now would not have happened in any other town,” he says, “because at every step of my healing and art progression, someone here has shown up to move things forward with my life and art. I feel like people here heard about what happened to me have become part of my story.”