Nightmare (& Dream) Acrylic Paintings

As an antidote to the time-consuming nature of stipple, our next assignment was to use acrylic paints to illustrate a dream or a nightmare. I'm lucky to remember many of my dreams so coming up with ideas for this assignment was a cinch, and I ended up developing two of them simultaneously - painting one while waiting for the other to dry & vice versa.














The nightmare painting (done on vellum-textured bristol board) was the one used to fulfill the assignment requirement that all parts of the image be blurry besides one bit in sharp detail. It represents this reoccurring problem I have across various dreams (which as a result become nightmares) where I lose control over my eyes. I'm usually pretty cranky when waking up from dreams like that.

That reminds me! During the digital video editing techniques class I took in my senior year of college, the prof showed us an experimental video called "The Wold Shadow" by Stan Brakhage. I can barely keep my eyes on it for the duration of its 3 or so minutes because it evokes how randomly blurry the world looks to me in those kinds of nightmares! The video itself may seem a little dated (nightmare baggage aside, the blurring and sharpening effects make it look like he was just having a field trip with slider bars in an image editing program to audiences in the 21st century...) but don't let this deter you from looking up the writings & work of Mr Brakhage, as he has a lot of pretty interesting stuff to say.















Anyhow, to counter my nightmare dashed out on paper I also created this painting (on a preprepared canvas) of my favorite reoccurring power in dreams. Thankfully I have many more dreams where I can fly (if I get a good enough running start) than blurry vision nightmares...

*Around 1:34 in this trailer shows an example of how I fly in my dreams: