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Demetri's Dream

Dreamed 1982? by Demetri Porphyrios, as painted by his friend Rita Wolff

In the 1970s-80s, Rita Wolff painted a series of watercolors of dreams. Thirty or so were published in a book with this grandiose claim:

Although she is self-taught and has only been painting for a dozen years it can be said that Wolff has extended that art by a new category; because unlike the dream-like subjects of surrealism, Wolff creates pictorial records of actual dreams, of her own, of friends and acquaintances.

As if nobody ever painted or drew an actual dream before 1975!

Her real innovation is the high proportion of other people's dreams that Rita illustrated. She wasn't first; Henri Rousseau's famous The Dream was his friend Yadwigha's dream, not his own. But it's rare. Maddeningly, the book undercuts this genuine originality by omitting the "actual dreams" that the paintings illustrate--removing the other half of the collaboration!

As art, the imagery's skillful and atmospheric, but... this is all you get.

'Demetri's Dream', a watercolor by Rita Wolff: an earthquake wrecks Athens.
So, deprived of DP's own dream text, what can we see? It looks like a stylized version of Athens from the Acropolis, as the Parthenon collapses, its columns toppled in a quake. Fire spreads through the lower town. It feels like a companion piece to Anne's Dream, where a storm surge devours a coastal town. Between them she's covered all four classical elements--there wind and water, here earth and fire.

Either Wolff had a taste for apocalyptic dreams, or picked friends who did. Given her own dream The Threatened City, where a stone giant is ready to do the job, I suspect it's her own thing.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Rita Wolff: Watercolours, 1974-1985 by Rita Wolff, 1986; St Martin's Press, NY (Plate XV)


LISTS AND LINKS: earthquakes - fires - cities - Athens, Greece - nightmares - collaborations - watercolor & gouache - more Rita Wolff

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