Today’s watercolor experiment:

Inspiration

I was trying to figure out how to make visible, a dream I had last night. It was, as most dreams seem, amorphous. I remember that I was in the process of creating something. It was a medical procedure, Frankensteinian, in a way. A body lay flat on a wooden bed, another, not living, was suspended above it, somehow reclining face down an identical upside-down structure.  There was a transfer of something between the two.

The plan:

I wanted to paint a rendition of my dream. I intended to paint the bottom with a dark blue that would fade into a cloudy mist.  Within the mist, I was going to suggest a wooden table topped with a prone figure.    At the top of the frame would be the other platform suspended from chains. The background would also be dark, perhaps streaked with lightning bolts.

That was the plan.

Process:

I began by wetting the rough-surfaced paper. I applied several different blues at the bottom, starting with Prussian blue. I added cerulean and indanthrone blue. At the top, I also used indanthrone blue and dabbed it away to make clouds. The lightning was to follow at a later stage.

It did not take me long to realize that I was not going to recreate the impression of my dream. I just could not see how to introduce the wooden structures.

Plan B

I abandoned my original idea and proceeded with the composition based on its appearance. The colors on the paper, especially the upper part where I blotted up some pigments to create areas that looked like clouds, reminded me of a landscape.  Therefore I added a lemon yellow glaze at the bottom to create a green foreground. I used using a dip pen to create contours in the foreground with green water-soluble ink.

Finally, I added a cadmium red light spot just above the green base. I lightly tinted the bottom of the clouds with a cadmium red/titanium white mixture to give an impression of a reflection.

Best Laid Plans
9″x12″ 140# Rough Watercolor Block

Comment:

I am disappointed that I was not able to make my dream images visible. When I was a kid, we had a toy that consisted of a plastic box with a clear top and whose bottom consisted of raised plastic walls in the form of a maze. The idea was to tilt it back and forth to get the mercury blobs inside, all in one place.  Some of my dreams are like visual quicksilver: the more I try to make them visible, the less successful I am. Surely this is one of those times.