A few acrylic dreamscapes from my imagination ✨️🖼🦋✨️
First, thank you for browsing my work 🎨 ✨️🙏✨️
I started painting after losing my job and housing in the pandemic and have kept going ever since. In terms of my process, I paint from the unconscious, spontaneously, without foresight into the final result or ultimate subiect matter so almost all these pieces have different paintings underneath. I'lI put on music and enter flow consciousness and allow experiences and other (psychological) material to express itself from my brain, down my arms, and through my fingers onto the canvas. A lot of water goes onto each canvas and half the time my conscious mind thinks, "This is a mistake. This isn't going anywhere. What the heck is this even supposed to be?!" I'lI stop and let it dry and return hours or days or sometimes even weeks later to restart the process.
A lot of emotion/energy finds its way to the surface of my mind during the process and often a feeling of loss, nostalgic sadness, and emptiness comes up. Maybe because these images represent places and experiences that will never be except inside consciousness; experiences that only reside in imagination and offer a lot more peace and tranquility than the turbulence and trauma of the material/physical world.
The pieces also have themes of development and ambiguity of form, probably because of my fascination with evolutionary biology and how one species gives way to a new one; how every being is a becoming since it is always already under pressure (natural selection, for example) to evolve. My mind merges images of butterflies and plants and birds into hybrids of ambiguous symbols in many of these probably for this reason.
The first painting is called "You Are With Me in My Dreams" and was a commissioned piece for someone who lost her mom. The parallel branches represent the two of them and the left one turns away to represent her mom's departure. (She said her mom loved Nature and the stars so there's a lot of personal symbolism there.) Many of the objects are where they "shouldn't" be, such as the flowers and organisms in outer space, vines that double as pillars of light, and so on. I believe this is because dreams themselves are so weird, so haunting, so otherworldly. No matter how many times we dream over our lifetime, they are still strange, like traveling in consciousness to another world, even though dreaming itself is familiar (because it happens over and over).
Anyway, I never got to attend art school (too expensive and parents wouldn't support it), but painting transitional and developmental pieces is a journey and a practice that brings me tremendous fulfillment in the liminal spaces of my unconscious. I hope you enjoyed the virtual tour and thanks again for indulging my text. ✨️😊🙏✨️