Hope Road

The Colors of My Dreams

[reposted; see Monday's entry]

From Reading Lolita in Tehran:

“I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses, and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

And I thought, is that part of the reason for the shift from modernism to postmodernism? Have we finally realized that this facade of freedom we’ve created for ourselves is intolerable and bleak, so we have to move beyond obvious reality, beyond what we can see and what we’ve been taught?

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