Dream Paintings

My huband has been teaching me how to use GIMP, an free software programme alternative to Photoshop. Since I regularly need to adjust colour, crop and resize images, I have been getting in some practice with old polaroids of artworks that I don't have properly documented. I am only doing the simple things to the image, so there is still a lot of "noise".

This painting is one of many paintings I did at the time based on dreams. Specifically, in the dream I was surrounded by water looking up at the sky and could see a red sailed boat on the horizon. I sold this painting sometime in the 1980s to a friend in Toronto who was an art conservator at the time but then got into alternative therapies. Recently she let me know that this painting is hanging in the new offices of her practice. I was delighted that it still has pride of place! I saw it after she had it framed over 25 years ago and it looked fantastic (if I do say so myself!). The painting is primarily acrylic on heavy watercolour paper; two of the hands are silver paper affixed to the ground before painting was complete. Though not visible in this picture, there are many white lines radiating from the stars in the pink sky which I created painstakingly with a ruling pen (do people still use this tool?). The piece is quite large, either 3 or 4 feet square. 

This painting is also about 3 or 4 feet square, acrylic on heavy watercolour paper and based on the same dream. I don't know if this piece is rolled up somewhere or was a casualty of one of my purges!

Also taken from a tiny polaroid, this image is an installation view of some paintings that were shown in Winters College gallery while I was at York University. It may have been spring 1986 or may have been earlier. This triptych and diptych are acrylic on canvas, each panel being 4' x 3'. They are again based on the same watery dream with the starry sky and red-sailed boat. I know most definitely that these paintings no longer exist, as they were destroyed in a purge before I moved countries and the stretchers were sold to Central Technical School for use by students in the post-secondary art programme.