An Artist Looks at Dreams

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Out of our private gropings and self inspections grow our imaginative values, private language, imagery and memories. "In the caves of the mind one bats about to discover a light entirely of one’s own which, though it should turn out to be dim, is still worth a life." The dream images which follow are so sure, so exact, so much better in their wisdom than sometimes I am aware of awake; they are as a conduit into deeply felt analogies. They are beautifully creative and crystallize emotions into the scenes like in a play, only, one’s own life’s play.

I can touch this material only for a short while and even when I am working on a plate or on a painting of a dream, the time passes and then I have to leave it, so that I can save my sense of reality. This internal stage play with its intense allegory and organization, its distillation is offended by the disorganization of the everyday with its slowness of pace...in contrast the dream images with its hurry, its darkness of the reds, its extraordinarily condensed actions. When I am too lured backward and inward, I have to stop. Otherwise I would "fall off the cliff." I believe that it would be very hard to "come back", if let myself go "too far".

When I viewed the total body of art work, I realized that I changed modes. The earliest dream portrayal in etchings are very detailed, like the early dream stories, filled with exact people and events. The intaglio line and lift ground techniques of the printmaking process call for a graphic look. The later paintings are more disguised. Instead of filling in an outline with hatched shading, the paint is slouchy and it pushes outward to make a shape. I am influenced by the act of painting itself, and that offers more ingenuity. Connections are made between seemingly unrelated ideas and images in a way that stimulates the imagination and leads to new understandings. In art, one associates by colors and shapes, movement and design.

I wondered in my reading of Freud why the original form of the dream is not discussed. His dreams are translated into words and the associations from those words. He had written about Michelanglio and daVinci, but not in reference to their dreams. So, I believe that he was at the edge of new thinking as were Paul Gauguin and Edward Munch, with symbolism. Those contemporaries were very little known in Austria at the end of the l9th Century. But Freud omitted the visual form of a dream, that is, how it is presented to the dreamer, from his writings.

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Contents: The Art of May Lesser | An Artist Looks at Dreams
Preface
Preface page 1 - "I feel like I am being a traitor to..."
Preface page 2 - "I had left the ivory tower of the art..."
Preface page 3 - "Out of our private gropings and self..."
Preface page 4 - "In a dream, if there is a child held..."
Preface page 5 - "There is much in science that is..."
Preface page 6 - "The symbolic use of animals in..."
Preface page 7 - "With the medical series, I served as..."