My advanced painting class is working on their fourth painting: "paint a dream or a memory." The assignment also includes nightmares, "out of body experiences," hallucinations, and other levels of "consciousness (or "unconsciousness," as it were)." These things are nebulous things to capture in the mind, much less in paint. One of my favorite dream/nightmare images is Dorothea Tanning's "A Little Night Music."
This work has always captivated me. I believe GOOD art asks questions of the viewer and doesn't merely provide the answers or is "eye candy." I think GOOD art is a seduction of sorts. This painting has a series of strange juxtapositions that make it quite compelling: the child, partially clad, leaning against the doorway; another, with her back turned to the viewer--her hair is flying straight into the air; the giant sunflower in the red-carpeted hallway that leads the viewer's eye directly to another room with the door propped open and a mysterious light emitting from the opening; and stairs that run off the format with a dominant, activating diagonal running through the center of the composition. It's quite a disorienting image. It could be a dream, a memory, a salacious nightmare, or an allegory of puberty. What makes this image so compelling and such GOOD ar,t is that its possible meanings exist on so many different levels.
Read a summary of the piece at the Tate and check out other work by Dorothea Tanning.
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