I have a new subject for today and a break from portraits of my brother Mike. I was getting obsessed with portraying him and his essence. (See Mike Crying, Young Mike, In Transition, Final Transition, Double Mask, Stylized Portraits, Klee and Jawlensky-Influenced Portrait.)

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Today’s subject is an image from a dream I had last night. I dream vivid dreams, some of them have very good story lines as well. I remember one dream where there were credits at the end, just like the credits at the end of a movie. As in a movie, the names in my dream credits were scrolling too fast for me to read.

Dream:

I was in London, on a city street. Above me were these massive tree trunks. The trees were the kind one would see in a swamp. The tree trunks hung over the street and I was afraid that they might fall on me. I saw a tunnel cut through the tree trunks so that a person could walk through.

Dream Image – Trees
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Comment:

The problem in portraying a dream image is the same as transforming three dimensional space to a two dimensional piece of paper. It is not possible to simulate an immersive environment on paper. One must make a choice of what to include and what to exclude.

I could not figure out how to make the city street I saw in my dream. The left side of my painting was not the image in my dream. I captured the essence of my dream image even though it is not faithful to the image in my mind’s eye. That image has faded and I only have a vague sense of it.