For years now, I've been wanting to illustrate many of my dreams into drawings, paintings or sculptures. I just completed two such illustrations for my friends Krissy and Dennis. This will be an ongoing project that I can experiment with different styles and mediums. A difficult aspect to capture in a dream-inspired drawing or painting is the mood of the dream. I think that is what I base the success of the image upon. I think the three clowns dream is more accurate in mood than the library dream. But I am excited to have begun this series. Here are the very first!
I chose to paint this particular dream especially for my good friend Krissy. She and I had a distant and distracted phone conversation in the dream about her birthday (which is appropriate since I had the dream the night of her birthday.) The Staedler Fineliner markers I used for the outlines and the text, did not like the coating of modpodge I used to seal the painting (otherwise done in acrylic) and smeared a bit. Lesson learned.
This dream was recorded on January 23, 2004:
I was in the Woodbury Public Library, upstairs. I decided to try and look for maps and pictures and information on Lithuania. There were huge binders for every part of the world: Southeast Asia, Brazil, etc. I chose U.S.S.R assuming that since Lithuania was near Russia, it would be in there. It was not on any of the maps in the binder. All during this time, Krissy had called me and I was trying to talk to her and wish her a happy birthday. She was telling me that Alicia had sent her a big box full of strange, foreign foods. The conversation was getting distant as I was trying to research Lithuania. After a while I realized I didn't have the phone anymore. It just disappeared.
My first cat, Dusty, died while I was away at my first year in college. He was 16 years old and my mom had to put him to sleep because he had a mouth infection that would not heal and he couldn't eat or drink anymore. I had nightmares about him for quite a while after he died. I still have dreams about him to this day. I decided to finally post this today because I had a dream about him last night (he was completely infested with fleas and was very sick and I was in a panic, trying to save him.) This drawing was done in Prismacolor colored pencil and Staedler Fineline markers. I chose to draw it for Krissy's fiancée, and my new friend, Dennis.
I recorded this dream some time in 2000:
Mom was cooking dinner in the kitchen and Dad was sitting on the sofa watching TV. We somehow make Dusty come back to life and everything is fine until he morphs into a duck and starts eating a large amount of staples that were on the ground. I look up and hanging over the balcony are three small clowns with huge eyes, all singing a different song so it just sounds like noise. And I was trying to tell Mom that Dusty couldn't be a duck, he was my cat and I wanted him back. And Dad kept turning around and going, "SHHHH!" Mom told me that he was better as a duck because then he could live longer and wouldn't start to decompose and we wouldn't have to give him medication.
