Painting and Dreams: How do we capture dreams in art? 3/11/20
I had a dream about my grandparents. My grandparents have been dead a long time. The dream inspired me to make a painting.
In the dream I was standing in my grandparents house in the back room where, when she was alive, my grandmother used to knit or read while sitting next to the fire. In my dream, however, my grandmother was not sitting in her usual place. She was standing by the door and she was dressed very nicely as if she was going to a wedding. She had makeup on, her hair was done and she was wearing very nice clothes.
This is not how she usually presented herself when she was alive. She looked happy and pretty and I was saying this to her and slowly coming to the realisation (as you do in dreams) that she was present and I could talk to her even though I knew that she had died a long time before. I remember that she was kind of encased in a very large box which reminded me of a barbie doll box but also reminded me of her coffin. I was not at my grandmother’s funeral because I was living in London when she died and, as I was heavily pregnant with my twin daughters at the time, travel to Ireland was not possible for me. I began to say how happy I was to see her when I realised that my grandfather was also present.
He was outside the front of the house down the corridor which was behind where my grandmother was standing. She was telling him off for hurrying her along when she was talking to me. I became aware that Grandad was grumbling because he wanted to go to ‘the match’ and that they were late. I looked down the corridor and caught a glimpse of him in profile as he walked past the front door outside. He was bathed in sunshine and there was a lot of light around him. That is all I remember of the dream.
Catching a glimpse : A painting of a dream
The following day I went to the studio and I began work on Glimpse. It is a large oil painting on canvas stretched over a board. As a starting point I looked at old film stills I have of my grandfather walking on a beach in West Cork in the 1970’s. I used these to sketch his likeness. The rest of the painting was less deliberate and almost painted itself.
I layered the paint and pulled it across the canvas using brushes, cloths and sponges. When I now look at the finished painting I see that it has many horizons though I didn’t intentionally do that. I don’t know why the dream inspired me to make an image of my grandfather and not ‘Mam,’ as we used to call my grandmother. Often I feel that I am not fully in charge of what it is I paint. This is probably just as well! When I think about it, many of my paintings take on a dreamlike quality.
Glimpse, Oil on Canvas over Board, 94 x 140 cm, 2018