A Couple of Surrealist Dream Paintings
Dreams could fill a library. 😊 Here I want to follow a smaller question: how might I paint the movement and feeling of a dream, rather than a single scene from it?
Early Dreaming
Dreams have fascinated me since I was a teenager. Living in Vienna, I was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s writing. [1] But the Surrealists really turned my world around. André Breton opened the door, followed by painters such as Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico.
Breton and Robert Desnos encouraged me to pay attention to dreams, to cultivate them and to explore how far I could participate in their unfolding. [2]
Some of my earliest works were collages inspired by the Surrealists. I continued working into them with pen and ink, trying to make the unlikely scenes look as convincing as possible. That was the direction I wanted to take.
For all my enthusiasm, many depictions of dreams left me unsatisfied. They seemed like photographs of a dream sequence: static moments, or arrangements of unexpected objects that suggested a dream without conveying its movement.
In my previous post on perception, I asked how experience shapes what we see. That led to another question: might it also shape how we dream? I suspect it does. These paintings grew out of playing with that possibility.
Trying Sequences of Dreams
Dusk
Perhaps you know the feeling: it is late afternoon, you are tired and stretch out on the couch. You do not mean to sleep, but as soon as your eyes close, fragments of dreams begin to pass before them. At first, I thought of the invitation in Goethe’s Erlkönig. [3]
‘Won’t you come with me, my fine lad?
My daughters shall wait upon you;
my daughters lead the nightly dance,
and will rock you, and dance, and sing you to sleep.’
Then again, some viewers might complain that I had left out the handsome young men. 😊 In any case, the first sheet is an attempt to catch that moment of slipping towards sleep.
Per Aspera is another attempt to catch the first phase of entering a dream.
I am less concerned here with whether these are finished works than with what the experiments reveal. How can a painting carry the emotional force of a dream? That feeling is often what stays with me, and what I miss in many dream pictures.
Night
In another sheet, I tried to make the events less concrete. Sometimes I wake knowing I have had an intense dream but cannot recover a single scene. Only an indefinable feeling remains, accompanying me as far as the morning coffee.
Dawn
When I wrote this in June 2022, I was not sure this painting would survive. I might revise it or start again. Still, it had a thought behind it that amused me. I had wanted to dream “in Chinese”, but the phrase “Chinese Dream” already sounded politically occupied to me—an echo, to my ear, of the American Dream. So I painted a Japanese dream instead.
If I return to this sheet, I will have to be careful: how can I keep the Japanese accent I sense in it without making it too obvious?
Footnotes
[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, published in November 1899 with the date 1900. See the Freud Museum’s edition note. ↩
[2] Especially André Breton’s Les Vases communicants (1932). I refer here to its influence on my own practice, not to a general claim about controlling dreams. ↩
[3] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erlkönig. The English passage above is retained from the translation linked in the original post: “The Alder-King”. ↩
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