Dream or Sleep that is the question!

Here are some pages taken from my working sketch book, just to give you an idea of how I go about conceiving the idea of a painting and how that manifests itself into the finished article.

I adore Picasso’s’ The Dream’, his patterning in this painting, is so jazzy and energetic, in opposition to the passivity of the sleeping figure. This suggests to me that all that latent energy behind that sleeping face, has found expression in the decorative elements of the composition. A clever visual device to illustrate something so complex as a dream.

From my sketches  you can see that I was trying to compose my own’ Dream’ composition, with a format  similar to Picasso’s.  But I couldn’t quite work out how I was going to make the background dominate  the figure in the chair, that would suggest  a more Dream-like element. So it kept feeling like a ‘Sleep’ theme which to me is very different and not what I was setting out to achieve.    Then I was talking to a friend who was telling me about her planned day’s vacation after months of exhausting work, that had left her very frayed at the edges.  She was planning to book into a hotel for a day (on her own of course) and  spend the day in bed with all her favorite books around her; tea and meals to be eaten in bed and no one to disturb her; just the pure luxury of’ time out’ for one day. Once this vision got into my head it took over my original idea for formatting my composition, and instead, it evolved into a bird’s eye view of a figure on a bed with her chosen objects around her.   I drew and painted a  full size sketch for the finished painting which I forgot to photograph and has since been over-painted with a new idea for a new painting, but this would have looked very much like the painting itself.

I hope this to goes someway to help understand how I go about energizing and motivating myself into the painting process.   I think it goes to show that this process is sometimes only just that; just a means to an end; rather than an essential part of the finished product.

Now my only problem left, is what to call this finished painting, as I want to call it 'Dream' but somehow it's still suggesting 'Sleep' to me!! 

122x122cm oil on canvas