Hang On To A Dream
Using unnaturalistic color alongside the creation of illusionistic space, these paintings take on a sensational vibration — be it of light, temperature, sound, or atmosphere. Mixing gestures of deep space and flatness with pictorial impossibilities, such as levitating or glowing figures and repeating celestial bodies, invites dream-like possibility into the works and expands a feeling of strangeness or magic. The inclusion of the natural landscape is central to these works, as the place where psychic and tangible experiences — the mind and the body — meet and intermingle.
Referencing Eastern spiritual iconography and Western figuration within the landscape, the self-portrait figures take on an attitude of ease, self-assurance, comfort, and quiet empowerment, assured in a sense that they are where they need to be, in the here and now. They coexist with their natural surroundings, in harmony with its elements and changeful nature. This harmony and sense of comfort within one’s self combined with the pursuit of dream-like images and the intuitive color-use locate a sense of freedom — freedom from the limitations of reality, mundanity, or struggle, to embrace an alternate world of presence, possibility, and balance.
© 2018 - 2024 Grace Hager