The title is borrowed from Roy Orbison and the image from Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting The Bed and is also a response to a larger painting I previously made called Smoking and...
The title is borrowed from Roy Orbison and the image from Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting The Bed and is also a response to a larger painting I previously made called Smoking and thinking. To watch a sleeper might be construed differently depending on the situation. It might be tender or creepy. Asleep we are so vulnerable and alone. I often think of the very powerful people in the world – Trump, Putin or Theresa May - and what they look like asleep. Stripped of their power in some way. Under a spell. Alone. Dreams: this nightly parade re-ordering shapes and shadows, being chased, flying, or stuck in some banal endless task, round and round we go. Primo Levi writes in The Periodic Table that the prisoners in Auschwitz, “In their sleep, lick their lips and move their jaws, dreaming of food.” I thought of the inner world of sleep here being reflected in the incessant patterning. Pattern might evoke a reverie or aid hypnosis.