
Fine artist Efi Kokkinaki paints a language we can all understand. The feelings that arise from her works provide a balm for the sin sick soul. A kind of innocence overlying the harsh realities of another world combines in a way reminiscent of early works by Marc Chagall and his paintings of his little Russian village.
As the eye flows through and around the soaring textures and soothing colors in Efi’s work, a sense of peace and weightlessness emerges and helps breed our belief that in fact, we have reached another dimension, a dimension we may have experienced only in a dream.
By Jan Kirstein, writer and visual artist
I am a painter, an art teacher in school and I also illustrate books for children.
Painting is my language to express the world as I see it…
Efi is an artist from Greece. Her Facebook Painting Page and Instagram are listed below.
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.
(Thomas Browne, On Dreams)
…night after night, with calm incuriousness we open the door into that ghostly underworld, and hold insane revels with fantastic spectres, weep burning tears for empty griefs, babble with foolish laughter at witless jests, stain our souls with useless crime, or fly with freezing blood from the grasp of an unnamed dread ; and, with the morning, saunter serenely back from these wild adventures into the warm precincts of the cheerful day, unmoved, unstartled, and forgetting.
(Elizabeth Bisland, Dreams and their Mysteries)
Dreams have long proved a fertile ground for human creativity and expression, and no less so than in the visual arts, giving rise to some of its most arresting images. In addition to the many and varied dreams so important to religion and myth there has emerged, in the last few centuries since the birth of Romanticism, an exploration of the more personal dream-world. Indeed, with its link to the unconscious, the form has perhaps proved the perfect vehicle for those artists looking to surface that which lies submerged – desire, guilt, fear, ambition – to bring to light the truth the waking mind keeps hid.
No doubt, also, artists have been attracted to the challenge of giving form to something so visually intangible as a dream, a challenge taken up in many ways through the centuries. More often than not there appears the sleeping body itself, with the dream element incorporated in a variety of ways. Common is for the dream sequence to appear in a totally separate part of the image, as if projected on the walls of the sleeping mind: often in the midst of that familiar floating cloud, but also as emerging from nearby objects or events of the day (see the Toyokuni image below) . Also common, particularly in the depiction of nightmares, is for the figures of the dream to simply appear as though in the room with the sleeper, often directly upon the body itself (see the Fuseli below). With the advent of photography, and the potential of double exposures, we see also a different way of trying to capture that intangibility of the dream image. With both the Grandville and Redon images featured, and the work of the Surrealists they anticipate, we see a different approach entirely, one which looks past the sleeper to focus solely on the imagery of the dream itself, and in the process perhaps giving a more true impression of the strangeness and otherworldliness which so often characterises the dream experience.
Left: Painting by Nancy Hillis. Top right: Fine art print by Jan Kirstein and bottom right: Collage by Hildy Maze. To contact Hildy Maze or Nancy Hillis with further questions, just message me. For more information about the print by Jan Kirstein click here
Gallery wall includes painted panels on left, by Karen Jacobs, top right image is painting on paper by Lee Brewster and the bottom right is a fine art print by Jan Kirstein. For inquiries about the work on Lee Brewster and Karen Jacobs you can contact me on this website. Also I have stories on both of these artists on this blog as well. To find out more about the fine art print by me, click here.
Create a gallery wall in your home. If you would like help with this fun project, just email me at janiskirstein@gmail.com, or contact me on this website. I would love to hear from you and help you out with choosing your preferences.