Purchased in a thrift store for $10, this aboriginal Australian painting could be worth as much as $8,000.
G.H. found a wonderful painting at a thrift store and sent me a photo, and he is such a genius, because he thinks it may look like a dream.
And indeed it does — but not in American or European art, but in a very different culture.
And G.H. wonders if it is a dream painting. In other words, is this painting a message conveyed from an artist about the world of his or her dreams?
It is.
The definition of “dream painting” depends upon what you consider a dream to be, what you consider a dream reality to be and what a painting should portray if it is about a dream.
You see how I loved to think about G.H.’s painting, found in a thrift store for $10.
All these questions are so interesting. Because it turns out various cultures have various ways of defining both “dream” and “art.”
I started my search to help G.H. to find the origin by Googling “dream paintings.” I found an article that was brilliant, but very European-focused, citing the “Debt Dreams Owe to Art in Dreams and Nightmares.” Well, you guessed it, the illustrations of this article were from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, specifically “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (15th century).
Scholars have said perhaps Bosch was envisioning Heaven and/or Hell, or maybe he was just not interested in that literalism. And maybe he understood and could paint the European realistic language of illustration art, and he did that so fantastically, to make us question reality.
But I notice that G.H.’s painting is not European, it is Australian, and specifically aboriginal Australian. For that definition, there is no dividing line between what art Iis and what is true, and what is not in visual imagery.
In certain traditions, art is not thought of as true, or not. It is thought of as utilitarian, a means to an end. Art therefore is not held up as separate from reality at all, and therefore not associated with the abstraction in literal portrayals (such as European realistic paintings).
But occasionally abstraction is closer to the reality of dreams. In the case of G.H.’s work of aboriginal art, this work is not about the abstraction of dreams, it is about the reality of dreaming each night. And we all do that, and as we know from REM-sleep experiences, dreaming is all time based.
What I love about this is the fact that this painting measures time with dots and that the artist (and many of these aboriginal artists are not listed; we have no authorship) is brilliant at suggesting time and dreams, both.
What I love about this piece is the symbol of dots. Like all punctuation, the dots make sense because they are the time-makers/markers of an experience of a dream. And because this is a dream painting, we sense that the artist is interpreting his or her dream in a narrative (dot after dot, punctuation after punctuation) time-based, narrative experience. The images the person is dreaming about are not painted, but the time sequence of the images is definitely portrayed. What a novel way of marking the way the mind thinks whilst dreaming!
The glory of this painting, which was found for $10 a thrift store, is not the portrayal of realism as we think of it, but the portrayal of another kind of realism, which is the meaning of a personal story, unknown to others, but punctuated.
If you can think of the swirls and the dots as markers along the axis of a dream, you will get my meaning. There are a few major collectors here in Santa Barbara of this art form, which is so very close to abstract European Abstract Expressionism, but so different as well.
These aboriginal dream paintings at their best can be worth six figures. And I would say that the quality of this is so good that if G.H. could research the artist (Sotheby’s in Australia has a branch that can set an auction estimate on this if you contact them), I bet you are looking at $8,000.
So happy to have had the chance to see this wonderful piece! If there is anyone reading this that collects these and can recognize the artist, please get in touch with Elizabethappraisals@gmail.com. I would appreciate it for G.H. who just got lucky and could recognize dreaming in art.
Dr. Elizabeth Stewart’s “Ask the Gold Digger” column appears Saturdays in the News-Press.
Written after her father’s COVID-19 diagnosis, Dr. Stewart’s book “My Darlin’ Quarantine: Intimate Connections Created in Chaos” is a humorous collection of five “what-if” short stories that end in personal triumphs over present-day constrictions. It’s available at Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara.
