It’s Only a (Pompeiian) Dream

It's Only a (Pompeiian) Dream

 

Oil painting on canvas, 24″ x 30″ (60 cm x 76 cm), September 2012

Although the title reassures that it was only a dream,  the picture goes beyond the dream; after having a  dream there’s always thinking about the dream that always adds more to it. The process doesn’t stop there: it continues while working on the picture. At the end something that started as a dream becomes a picture that claims its own existence and meaning.

Like my previous two oil paintings the idea for this one has its visual source in the Mediterranean, although stylistically it’s different from them. While the other two paintings were formally divided in ten vertically positioned segments in which the sky and the water do not have continuity from one segment to another, here, in this narrow Mediterranean street there is much more visual coherence present. Also, the division of the pictorial elements is more subtle here. They are divided into three groups: the people, the architecture and the elemental forces – water and fire (these two taking the semblance of the sky and magma-like street. The dramatic linear architectural perspective has it’s vanishing point somewhere around the male person’s head; the perspective of the three foggy circles follows different logic, but also starts from the same vanishing points equally indicating that all had started in the person’s head in the form of a dream. The circles of the dream do not cover the elemental forces because they are not part of the dream but rather part of the everyday’s real life in which the Mediterraneans live running for their lives trying to find surviving safe spots for living in the titanic clash of the elemental forces (often seen as the mythological personifications).