Year 11 Art Piece - "Essence Of A Dream"

When I was in year eleven (a few years ago now!) our unit of study for art class was Surrealism.

I immediately liked this style of art as it has a great deal of mystery involved in discovering the 'hidden meaning' of the artworks created. 

Our art teacher also set the medium as being chalk pastels. Anyone who is a pastel artist can appreciate just how beautiful they are to work with. The pastels in the high school art room weren't the best quality; they were very hard and quite scratchy, but they're the ones I had to use way back then! I prefer Rembrandt as they are so much smoother and softer.

My piece is called "Essence Of A Dream". All the separate elements represent all of the things that a person can dream about. 

The cats eye is a representation of dreaming about animals of any and all kinds.
The clowns eye is a symbol of happiness and laughter.

The cliffs represent dreaming of struggles, challenges and hardships in life.

 

The two roses on either side of the face are images that mean romance,
love and relationships in our dreams.

Choices and directions in life can be the subject of our dreams at times too,
this is what the stairs represent.

The ship is my favourite image in this whole artwork. I thought only a couple
of years ago that it actually looks very 'Narnian' to me, what do you think? The ocean
represents dreams of the ocean and all things pertaining to it, and the ship represents
adventure and risk-taking.

The night sky shows the obvious time of day that
most dreams take place -
the evening.

The world as the bowl of the hat is an illustration of two things;
the first being travel and countries,
the second being all the world's different nationalities that share the
process of dreaming.

 

The scorpion represents all of our fears and horrors that manifest
themselves in our dreams as nightmares.

My beautiful husband payed for this piece to be professionally framed a few years
ago as a Christmas gift ... His support of my creativity means so much to me!

The finished artwork. I never thought I would have it framed!


Have a great week creating beautiful things!