Dream Mood

She gazes at something outside the frame. I have never decided what it is.

A woman lies on her back, her head cradled in her own hands, looking freely upward. She is somewhere between waking and dreaming, moving among her desires and her fears without fear — and it is the without fear that interested me. Her serene gaze and faint smile are not softness. They are a kind of strength.

When we look up, we meet the sky — that boundless vastness that has always stood for freedom. There is no sky in this drawing. There is a brown ground, a black shadow, and a woman who has found the openness somewhere else. So I find myself asking, looking at her: is she liberated from what was expected of her? Has she let herself become fully who she is?

Dreams have drawn artists for centuries, and the Surrealists made the unconscious their material — a window onto the secret inner self. I drew this one in 2001: fine hatching across the face, a wash laid down for the ground, and the loose circling lines that gather around her head.

Perhaps new horizons are opening in her. Perhaps she is only resting. What she sees, I leave to you.

Ink on paper, 39 × 53 cm. One of a kind, signed. From my studio in Malexander, Sweden.