About the Art: Dream

Update 2017/05/21: Changed post title from “New Art: Dream” to “About the Art: Dream”

Dream. It’s one of my favorite words.

My favorite number is 4. I love 4. It’s so…dependable. It has four sides, four corners, four legs. It’s stable. It’s round. It’s complete.

But, when we get away from base numbers and talk about word length, I have a thing for words that are 5 letters long. Perhaps it’s because there are more 5-letter words than 4-letter words? Perhaps it’s because of the term “four letter words” giving the wrong connotation to an entire class of words? I don’t know, but whatever it is, I love 5 letter words, and Dream is one of my favorites.

Considering my love of words, I kept going with my recent trend of using lettering in my work. While I’m a big proponent of visual art remaining wordless to portray an idea with symbols and movement, I do think that words can have a particular impact in a work. I mean, if they didn’t, no one would care about a title, right? {:

So, I inked Dream in hand-drawn script. I found the stretching, splaying, and weaving of the Soulprinting in Up With The Sun fascinating, so when I sat down to draw Dream, I employed the same technique, just with more colors. This made the interplay between the swirls more interesting.

I wanted the Soulprinting to be dense around the word so I filled in the gaps with dots and circles. I let the outer areas reach out into space, because really, what is a dream but a reaching of your soul toward something you’d like to attain?

The swirls seem to evoke images of dream catchers. I don’t think I consciously intended for them to look like that. But I know so much of what I do is underneath the surface. I often don’t even know the point behind a piece until I’m finished with it. Most of my work, the decision-making behind it, is subconscious, which is precisely why I call my work Soulprints. It’s like my soul is talking to the paper.

Or maybe it’s closer to my soul dreaming on paper. {: