Acrylic on Canvas | 40×40 inches | 2017 | Divine Feminine
Every artist has a painting that changed everything.
The Dreamers is that painting.
A photographer of twenty years — fashion, music, the world seen through a lens — puts down the camera and picks up a brush. The canvas is 40×40 inches, which is large, which is the point, which is terrifying in exactly the way that necessary things are terrifying. And onto that canvas, with the full weight of two decades of looking at human beings through a viewfinder and understanding instinctively how light falls on a face and how a body holds itself when it forgets it is being watched — two girls in white dresses, reclining in tall grass, dreaming.
It worked. Completely, immediately, undeniably. The eye that had spent twenty years behind a camera knew exactly how to find the painting inside the subject. The scale that had seemed impossible became the point — the figures needed that much space, that much grass and colour and gestural energy surrounding them, to breathe the way they needed to breathe.
This is where everything began.
The two figures recline in a world of extraordinary painterly energy — teal and gold and deep green and the pink of the sky above them, the grass alive with the loose, confident brushwork of someone who has just discovered what their hand can do with a brush and is not yet afraid of what they don't know. The white of their dresses catches every colour around them — teal, pink, gold, green — the fabric becoming a surface on which the whole world reflects itself. They lean into each other with the particular ease of two people who have known each other long enough to share a silence, a dream, a field.
What connects them is deliberately, beautifully unresolved. Friendship so deep it becomes something else. Sisterhood. The particular closeness of two women who have decided, in this moment, that the world and its demands can wait — that the grass and the light and each other are enough, are everything, are all that is required. The sapphic reading is there for anyone who feels it and entirely absent for anyone who doesn't, which is exactly as it should be. The painting holds the ambiguity the way tall grass holds light — completely, without effort, without needing to explain itself.
The Ophelia lineage runs through both figures — those Millais-bright dresses, that surrender to the horizontal, that quality of women reclaimed from consciousness and given back to the natural world, except that here the natural world is not dangerous but generous, not drowning but holding, not the end of something but the beginning.
This painting began a series. The series is gone — sold, dispersed, living in collections that will never know each other. The Dreamers alone remains. The first one. The one that proved it was possible. The one the artist has kept through everything, through every subsequent painting and series and evolution of practice, because some things you keep until you know they have found exactly the right place to go.
That moment has arrived.
✦ Original, one-of-a-kind painting ✦ Acrylic on canvas ✦ 40 × 40 inches ✦ Created 2017 ✦ The first painting of the artist's full-time practice ✦ The only remaining work from the Ophelia series ✦ Part of the Divine Feminine series ✦ Free worldwide shipping — ships rolled in a tube
Stretched Canvas Delivery For collectors who prefer to receive this work pre-stretched and ready to hang, please note that due to its exceptional scale, oversized freight shipping costs are at the client's expense. I'm happy to provide a freight quote tailored to your location — simply contact me before purchasing. Alternatively, your preferred art handler or framer can stretch the canvas locally upon arrival.
The first one. The one that proved it. Ready, finally, to go.
Acrylic on Canvas | 40×40 inches | 2017 | Divine Feminine
Every artist has a painting that changed everything.
The Dreamers is that painting.
A photographer of twenty years — fashion, music, the world seen through a lens — puts down the camera and picks up a brush. The canvas is 40×40 inches, which is large, which is the point, which is terrifying in exactly the way that necessary things are terrifying. And onto that canvas, with the full weight of two decades of looking at human beings through a viewfinder and understanding instinctively how light falls on a face and how a body holds itself when it forgets it is being watched — two girls in white dresses, reclining in tall grass, dreaming.
It worked. Completely, immediately, undeniably. The eye that had spent twenty years behind a camera knew exactly how to find the painting inside the subject. The scale that had seemed impossible became the point — the figures needed that much space, that much grass and colour and gestural energy surrounding them, to breathe the way they needed to breathe.
This is where everything began.
The two figures recline in a world of extraordinary painterly energy — teal and gold and deep green and the pink of the sky above them, the grass alive with the loose, confident brushwork of someone who has just discovered what their hand can do with a brush and is not yet afraid of what they don't know. The white of their dresses catches every colour around them — teal, pink, gold, green — the fabric becoming a surface on which the whole world reflects itself. They lean into each other with the particular ease of two people who have known each other long enough to share a silence, a dream, a field.
What connects them is deliberately, beautifully unresolved. Friendship so deep it becomes something else. Sisterhood. The particular closeness of two women who have decided, in this moment, that the world and its demands can wait — that the grass and the light and each other are enough, are everything, are all that is required. The sapphic reading is there for anyone who feels it and entirely absent for anyone who doesn't, which is exactly as it should be. The painting holds the ambiguity the way tall grass holds light — completely, without effort, without needing to explain itself.
The Ophelia lineage runs through both figures — those Millais-bright dresses, that surrender to the horizontal, that quality of women reclaimed from consciousness and given back to the natural world, except that here the natural world is not dangerous but generous, not drowning but holding, not the end of something but the beginning.
This painting began a series. The series is gone — sold, dispersed, living in collections that will never know each other. The Dreamers alone remains. The first one. The one that proved it was possible. The one the artist has kept through everything, through every subsequent painting and series and evolution of practice, because some things you keep until you know they have found exactly the right place to go.
That moment has arrived.
✦ Original, one-of-a-kind painting ✦ Acrylic on canvas ✦ 40 × 40 inches ✦ Created 2017 ✦ The first painting of the artist's full-time practice ✦ The only remaining work from the Ophelia series ✦ Part of the Divine Feminine series ✦ Free worldwide shipping — ships rolled in a tube
Stretched Canvas Delivery For collectors who prefer to receive this work pre-stretched and ready to hang, please note that due to its exceptional scale, oversized freight shipping costs are at the client's expense. I'm happy to provide a freight quote tailored to your location — simply contact me before purchasing. Alternatively, your preferred art handler or framer can stretch the canvas locally upon arrival.
The first one. The one that proved it. Ready, finally, to go.
