…..and about the Wolf hour
Dreams have played an important role in my work for many years. Earlier, when I painted more figuratively, I sometimes tried to translate particular dreams into images. As my work became increasingly abstract, this approach changed. I became less interested in illustrating what I had dreamed and more interested in the peculiar state of dreaming itself – a world in which fragments appear, disappear and combine without having to obey the logic of waking life.
This shift also changed the way I paint. Forms can remain ambiguous, spaces do not have to be coherent, and figures may emerge only to dissolve again. The two works shown here approach this territory from different directions. They are not illustrations of particular dreams, but paintings concerned with the unstable space between image, memory and imagination.
The Dreamweaver’s Daughters Cast their Nets
In The Dreamweaver’s Daughters, forms seem to float through an undefined blue space. Some suggest bodies, fragments or creatures, while others resist identification altogether. For me, this ambiguity is important. The painting should not settle into a single readable scene; it should remain in motion between recognition and uncertainty.
The title imagines the daughters of a dreamweaver casting their nets as we drift into sleep. What they catch are perhaps fragments of memory, images, fears and desires – the disconnected material from which dreams construct their temporary worlds. The painting does not describe a particular dream. Rather, it evokes that moment when ordinary reality begins to loosen and another kind of visual logic takes over.
Dreams, the Wolf Hour, and the Space Between
The second work belongs to what I think of as the Wolf Hour – that strange period of the night when sleep becomes lighter and old dreams, thoughts and anxieties can return with unexpected intensity. Half awake and half asleep, we are no longer completely inside the dream, but not yet safely back in the ordered world of the day.
The painting is correspondingly more restless. Sweeping dark forms move across a colder, more open space, while traces of pink, red and black interrupt the surface. I do not see these forms as fixed figures. They belong to that uncertain hour in which the mind can turn a fragment into a presence and a shadow into something almost alive.
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