Flanders by Rachael Dutton, 1981, oil on canvas, 3x4'
Flanders
Dreamed c.1981 by Rachael Dutton
i sleep i dream i wake up i grasp at details before they fade away, transfering them across the mysterious border between memory and dream, making them accessible to recall, to painting. i paint my dreams because they are the most absorbing, intoxicating images i have ever painted. it is profoundly important to me that a figure moves from right to left, or that a blue is a certain specific hue. through a sequence of dreams, of paintings, i watch the movements of forces, colors, shapes, in the guise of people dogs trees. i have a sense of the choreography of my own balance of powers.
a black shape moves in from the lower left, a friendly black dog listening to flute music. i am playing a loaf of french bread with appropriately spaced flute holes. in the distance a clear open vista of hills, a lake, and soft pink sky. in the intervening day, the black force and pink field shift, change, into another night's dreaming, black shape moving up moving down from above, aiiiii, vultures are carrying serene white big-bellied deer off into a pink sky, pink no longer clear and quiet of dawn or dusk but of some unborn time primordial. the deer are dead, asleep, also unborn, embryonic and glowing softly. the vultures and two very much smaller dogs contend over the deer. "there were four deer" two are on a round red platform, one is carried in the sky. the other is already, where?i try to paint my dreams as honestly as i can, without analyzing them or trying to make them fit preconceived ideas about myself. i try to paint them in the visual equivalent of first person narrative, to evoke the way it felt to me when i was in the dream, where i was what i saw or touched. sometimes i paint my hands reaching into the picture the way you see your own hands in front of you as you go through a day.
SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.5, no.3/4, 1988, p.161-4) Sadly, none of the dreams she recounts fit the painting or its curious title. And I've been unable to find a color image online.
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