Overall, the theme of this oil sketch aligns with the question of how we see, remember, and reconstruct visual experience. Its content uses atmosphere as a perceptual condition, giving the image the feeling of a fleeting perception, a memory, or a dream rather than a fixed scene.
What immediately stands out perceptually is how a veil of light and haze softens everything. We perceive this in the figures dissolving into their surroundings. Blurred edges further accentuate this and reinforce that the image is one in which color (warm ochres, pale blues, muted greys) carries more weight than line.
The figures are important here because they resemble rather look like actual people. Anonymous, transient, and caught mid-movement, none are psychologically individualized or clearly stated. Yet, nonetheless, they are integrated into the rhythm of the setting
Whereas this work’s hazy quality loosely connects the work to Impressionist and post-Impressionist concerns, its haze in actuality is more in tune with later 20th-century explorations of memory, perception, and process. Thin, scumbled layers, soft blending rather than broken color, and what seems to denote some sort of “optical fog” is a defining feature. Thus, unlike the visible strokes of many Impressionistic art, the brushwork here has a more dreamlike or memory-like form. For example, if Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare paintings are about the instability of seeing in the present moment, this sketchy work registers the instability of seeing as it fades into memory
Bay Area Figurative art another kind of lens into the image. Like the works of these West Coast artists (e.g., Richard Diebenkorn), a dominant feature in this painting is the flattened spatial zones (foreground band, horizon band, sky band) and how the work presents a dynamic balance between abstraction and representation.
In summary, like some recollections, Dreaming of London seems to dissolve and mesh with perception and memory. One could say that it pinpoints a clear distinction between how we see when we observe as compared to the haziness of memory.
• • • • • •
Amy Ione
Title: Dreaming of London
Date: 2003
Medium: Oil on Canvas, in black floater frame
Dimensions: 24x18x1 inches
Signed
Catalog Number: 25663
Exhibitions
2011
Moods and Variations, Au Coquelet, Berkeley CA. June 1—June 30.
2008-2009
Perceptual Ruminations. Gaia Art Center, Berkeley Art Center, October 2008—March 2009
2007
Looking Back, Au Coquelet, Berkeley, February 1—28.
2004
Perceptual Notations, YWCA at the University of California, Berkeley. May/June.