THE DREAM SUITE

Dreaming, which we all do, keeps us at bay with its myriad of irrational scenarios and yet, draws us in with its intriguing mysteries.

My suite of paintings and drawings attempt to give a visual voice to that mystery without trying to illustrate the dream itself. Linear configurations of stones, geological lines, quartz and feldspar running through basalt inspired my choice of Japanese characters for the text that appear in some of the works – dreams, tucked away, folded into boxes. I chose Japanese for it’s visual grace and role as a hidden voice, hidden at least from the majority of Westerners. Wanting a context for the script, I decided to use my own writings, my poems about dreaming in particular and had them translated into Japanese.

We know these things, these arrangements of objects. They are familiar, but we don’t know them gathered together in this way or what they might mean. And in this, I have found a shared language with the nature of dreaming. The contrast this represents has become a very intriguing line to walk as a realist painter.

This poem appears in the Japanese scripts of most of the drawings and paintings.

Signature

In the desert of pure feeling
we must forget all names,
freeing our dreams to construct
the symbols of our wonderment
and of our agony.
The painter loved the world
with its conflicts of light and shadow,
desolation and beauty.
His was just one intention in a troubled world,
the intimacy growing like ivy
around the obstacles of doubt,
as he watched
the carving continue on the monument of faces,
birds filling and emptying the promontory of sky,
the tenuous construction on networks of bridges
from soul to soul, dream to dream, day to day.

Tim O’Kane 2008