Monster Dream

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 3ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Greyscale

Monster Dream (2023) is a painting about the shadows that visit us in sleep — not to scare, but to reveal. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media piece from the Greyscale Collection captures the dream as terrain: murky, uncertain, and strangely alive.

The canvas pulses with smoky reds, tarnished silver, ochre, and oil-slick blues. Textures ripple and twist — some soft, others jagged. Shapes form and dissolve like creatures half-seen through fog. There’s no clear narrative, just emotional texture: anxiety, fascination, even tenderness. The monster isn’t the threat — it’s the guide.

I painted Monster Dream after a stretch of vivid dreams that left me wondering what my subconscious was trying to surface. I wasn’t afraid of the imagery. I was curious. This painting became a portal — not into nightmare, but into the archetype of what we suppress and what we can learn from it.

The piece recalls the emotional weight of Francis Bacon, though it trades his brutality for mystery. Like Bacon, I’m interested in what the body remembers when the mind forgets, and how paint can give form to that unspoken residue.

Monster Dream isn’t about monsters. It’s about the parts of ourselves that feel too strange or too strong to fully see when we’re awake. In the dream, they arrive. And in the painting, they remain.

As part of the Greyscale Collection, this work holds a space for the surreal — not as escape, but as encounter.