dreamart – Dottie-may Aston

When writing an essay about Stalemate, an etching by Dutch artist Marcelle Hanselaar, I found myself very inspired by the way she works and conducts herself. Hanselaar says that painting is for the day and drawing is for the night, after hearing this, I tried it for myself, and I think she is right. Whenever I paint once the sun has gone down it feels a bit clumsy – the subtlety of colour is hard to detect in unnatural light. I have found that monochrome pencil drawing is about the relationship of tone which works even better at night.

Inspired by Hanselaar’s words, I draw at night when my ideas and imagination are most active. Sometimes I work from reality when I feel I’m unable to depict what I’m imagining. Depicting from imagination is unplanned and flows from my head, to my hand, onto the paper. That is how the image below came into existence.