The Artistic Harrovian - Dreams

Karis Lau, Y9 Anderson Sally Li, Y9 Anderson Megan Siu, Y13 Wu Reika Oh, Y13 Gellhorn Ashleigh Tsang, Y9 Wu Erin Tse, Y9 Anderson Cyrus Tsui, Y12 Peel Vissia Wan, Y6 Nightingale Sislly Wong, Y9 Anderson Winnie Wong, Y9 Gellhorn Amy Xiong, Y10 Gellhorn Elisa Xu, Y12 Keller Nicole Yeung, Y12 Anderson

Deceived

Sofia Huang, Y9 Gellhorn

Dreams can branch out to multiple subtopics; one of them being Nightmares. To me, Nightmares are all your insecurities and flaws bunched up into this dark place that you cannot escape from unless you wake up. My artwork depicts the worst nightmare of a woman in the piece: cracking from this innocent, ‘normal’ facade that she has so carefully built for herself. Firstly, the color yellow in the eyes not only contrasts with the black and whites of the rest of the artwork, but also, yellow symbolizes two polar opposites: hope and decay. This coupled with the fact that the second pair of eyes are looking away, demonstrates the fact that she is guilty and shows how she is trying to put on this mask of being pure and wholesome, even though those are nothing but lies and a front she puts on for those around her.

Secondly, the bloody nose on the left side of her face represents the already appearing cracks in her behavior and look, showing that although she is trying extremely hard to keep this act of hers up, parts of her evil self still slip out. Moreover, the sealed lips and the sealed eye in the center parts of the face display her efforts of trying to ignore and disregard this morph and change in her appearance as she slowly shows her true colors. Along with the lighting that resembles a spotlight, highlighting her guilt, we are then guided into her inner self: a vile, selfish monster.

I created this piece digitally and one thing I like about this piece is the pair of yellow eyes since it is the only part of the artwork that has color which contrasts with the drawing. The thing I dislike is the background since I think it lacks depth and symbolism.

An infant, on four legs and barely able to walk, sits by the window and stares into the stupendous infinity of the universe. Objects of his own imagined reality are projected onto the plain green fields outside, while toys and furniture float around him, as if gravity was turned off. Through this piece I wish to provide a vague visualisation of dreams meeting reality, to simulate a depiction of the limitless ambitions and boundless creativity often found in the naive, innocent and young. The fact that the child, with no intellectual capability, is able to dream up such a fascinating landscape, is a testament to the big dreams of society never achieved. The child never realises his limits, and it is precisely this ignorance that allows the aspiring fantasies to transpire in the first place. Yet, the child's dreams, albeit elusive, still illuminate the dark night into a gratifying glow. Dreams might be unattainable, imaginative, abstract or even stupid, but they transform our innate desires into an appealing midnight projection, constituting our most interesting traits of personality, entertaining our semi-conscious chapters of hallucinations. Never stop dreaming.

Cyrus Tsui, Y12 Peel

TEARS

I have used 135 black and white films for this photography record piece, with photoshop and procreate to add the variation of blue colors at meanwhile few collages at editing stage.

I have not done much planning with this series, because I wanted to capture the random and chaotic moments that are likely to appear inside dreams.

The pictures all had a sense of surreal, where everything is disordered and combined with nonsense, it is just like what will usually occur in our fantasied dreams. I woke up from my dream once with tears in my eyes.

Dreamt about the seaside with a magnificent view, a seaside that would only exist inside the dream. The longer I stayed, I felt like drowning, and everything faded away. So, when I woke up from my dream, I grabbed my film camera, went by the seaside, and started to look for the seaside in my dream.

Ashleigh Tsang, Y9 Wu

Nicole Yeung, Y12 Anderson

This work is aims to illustrate the distorted nature of dreams. Based on a simple video filmed in real life, I observed the motions of the subject from different angles, piecing them together to create a visual impression of dreams. I draw inspiration from artist Umberto Boccioni’s work, in which he investigated the relationship between a person in motion and their surrounding atmosphere. The progression of dreams is presented by the primary and secondary relationships between individual pieces of the subject, each representing a different place in time, where some are clearly in front of the others and some are hidden behind shadows. The fact that they are all mixed inside a same frame suggests the progression of time is insignificant in dreams. The colour choices also reflects my impression of dreams. I have chosen colours of high luminosity which contrasts greatly to show that dreams are often bizarre.

Jacqueline Chen, Y13 Anderson

What are

dreams

from the first point

A dream is a series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history. It is not known where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind. The power of dreams for artistic inspiration is not surprising, as many artists have received their creative ideas from their dreams. Dreams can be full of fantasy, a real life event that has happened recently, influenced by what we're thinking about before we go to sleep, or what we've experienced in our waking day.

About Alice in Wonderland

Alice in wonderland is a story written by Lewis Carroll in 1865. It is a detailed story about a young girl named Alice. It goes under the fantasy genre, also known as “Literary nonsense ” , going by the theme of “growing up ” . Although this story consists of many overly fantastical nonsenses, many aspects of this relate to dreams.

How Alice in Wonderland relates to Dreams

The ‘wonderland’ in the movie is based on a dreamland, where the objective of the illustrators was to portray the world as an abstract world. The story, first written by Lewis Carroll, which was then animated into movies and different variations of artworks and books, is a

very popular story because of the magical characters and imagery that highlighted the fantasy category, which inspired artists to produce their interpretation of the creative story. The intention was to throw the readers into a world of excitement and nonsense, therefore showing Lewis' idea of a ‘dream world’ in Alice in wonderland.

Alice in Wonderland in art

Throughout history, many artists have created many pieces that relate to Alice in wonderland’s theme, whether it be the illustration for the novel, or just simply as a theme of art. Although Alice in wonderland is well known for its fantasy aspects, many of the authentic depictions of Alice in wonderland contain many “horror” aspects. Take one of the original illustrations in the novel by John Tenniel. This scene is where she takes one of the potions and her neck grows long enough to reach the treetops. Regarding John Tenniel’s iconic style of Alice in wonderland illustrations, Google celebrated John’s 200th birthday by making the Google logo banner something that imitates John’s art style. Over the last 155 years, more than 20 famous artists have illustrated and depicted their own ideas of wonderland and dreams.

Talamaska’s paper artworks

Adamova Marina, mainly known as Talamaska is a graphic designer and illustrator from Moscow. She creates paper-cut art pieces inspired by Alice in wonderland. Five of her creations were even showcased at a personal exhibition in Moscow. Her artworks are often 25x25cm artworks based on iconic characters of Alice in wonderland such as the Cheshire cat and the rabbit.

Chise Iwakawa and Erin Tse, Y9 Anderson

For the topic of dreams, I've drawn a digital piece presenting a woman as the centre subject. I've used perspective and motion blur to shift the subject to create a blurry effect. I've decided to do this as in dreams, blurry vision often represents confusion or refusing to face or see a situation for what it is. As well as this, the blurriness also illustrates how our memory of our dreams becomes blurry and fuzzy after waking up. Furthermore, I drew her torso as a skeleton to create a sense of disintegration of our memory of our dreams after we wake up. Moreover, I used clone in Procreate to create duplicates of to subject to portray a sense of overwhelming, which correlates to the feeling of a fever/stressful dream.

Joyce Huang, Y12 Anderson

Megan Siu, Y13 Wu

Megan Siu, Y13 Wu

Common Dreams

Huang, Y9 Gellhorn

Dreams about falling from heights are pretty common. According to many modern interpretations, falling in dreams signifies that something in your life isn't going well. This often suggests that the person is required to rethink a decision made in the past.

This artwork shows a girl falling into an alternate dimension to escape from reality.

Dreams of being chased by an unknown being may be horrifying. While many people experience this dream, this dream indicates the yearning to escape from your fears or desires.

However, there is a more detailed analysis of this kind of dream. If you are being chased by an animal, this reveals that you are trying to break free from your emotions like anger or passion. If you are being chased by an unknown being, this represents you attempting to flee from your childhood or perhaps trauma.

Sofia

And finally, if you are being chased by someone of the opposite gender, this suggests that you have fear of love or a past relationship. The face buried deep in her hair shows that she is running away from her "other self". She is afraid of herself because of all the things that she has done in the past. She is not wrong in her intentions, but the way she has executed her plans has haunted her to this day. Linking back to the nightmare of "running away" she is running from herself.

Dreams about flying can be both exciting and scary. According to Tony Crisp who wrote the book, “Dream Dictionary” dreams about flying have two primary meanings. The first is a feeling of freedom or independence. On the other hand, this also implies the desire to escape the current world. This artwork represents dreams about flying because the idea of a bird flying into the horizon symbolises being able to be free and escape reality.

Erin Tse, Y9 Anderson

Ashleigh Tsang, Y9 Wu

Flights fFancy

Amy Xiong, Y10 Gellhorn

As I’m a person that dislikes dreaming and takes medication to typically avoid it, I’ve drawn something that may symbolise what a pleasant dream may look like, incorporating the genre of fantasy.

dislike how thoughtless it generally is; it’s not a piece of artwork that makes one stop and think, to read between the lines to see the deeper meaning. However, I do like the use of colour, however unfitting it may be; a fish of vibrancy in front of a sea of beige.

It symbolises my wish to have a pleasant dream. A dream without my brain being self-destructive coming up with the most vexatious scenes, and instead something calming; sitting on a goldfish whilst drifting through voidless nothingness.

FlowersofDreams

Our thought process starts off with the idea of dreams that are both pessimistic and optimistic. The kind of pessimistic part of our artwork is the use of only pencil, which forms an effect of only white and shades of black. The optimistic part of our project is the flowers and plants growing out.

This is meant to be the show of nature. Maybe the face did not have as much recognition, this is hinting that people cannot really recall their memories in dreams, creating a slightly blurry memory in mind.

This links to the theme of Dreams because it is not realistic and there is a positive side and a slightly ‘negative’ side in the artwork, referring to fabulous, beautiful, and warm dream, and the nightmare indicating

Winnie Wong, Y9 Gellhorn Karis Lau, Y9 Anderson

Chise Iwakawa. Y9 Anderson

Familiar

I have used Procreate for the base artwork and ibispaint for colouring and editing. I was first drawing from reference, but I decided to change the face to seem more familiar, or perhaps soothing from my perspective. I believe it portrays the surrealistic aspect of nightmares and how they are oddly familiar and sometimes even comforting. I like how the face turned out, but I feel like I can improve on the body and shading.

SnowHawk

Dreams are always what people want, but it is often unreachable. My dream is go to the Winter Olympics, but my parent do not support me because they think it is too dangerous. many people says that the things occurs in your dream is the things happen to you in the multiverse. I wish that my dream can happen in real life. Hawk Li, Y10 Churchill

This piece is a mixture of all the dreams I remember, and I combined them into one. Although I frequently dream and would like to put more stories into it, but unfortunately, I cannot recall most of them. This piece represents a yearning to reach something you can never get, because it is a dream. There are no faces in the image because I do not see anyone in my dream. They look like people, but I can never make out their faces, so I covered their heads with an astronaut helmet and a 1960 scuba gear helmet. The background is a mixture of things I see in my dreams, stars (mixture of hues of blues and pinks and deep purples). I added the sea animals there so that the elements would even out, the starry sky for the astronaut and the sea creatures for the scuba diver. I had a few other ideas, but I ultimately decided on this one because I thought it looked more harmonized.

Alicia Lau , Y9 Wu

RoseColouredGlasses

Sally Li, Sislly Wong and Charlotte Cheng, Y9 Anderson

Screen Absorption

Estelle Chan, Y13 Gellhorn

This piece draws the attention of the people totally absorbed by their phones, which is what we normally do before we go to sleep. Electronics have significantly disturbed our sleeping schedule and sometimes I find it hard to sleep if I have stared at the screens for too long. An important task to achieve is to highlight people's expressions while using the phone, to show that how addictive the thing inside the screen is.

By omitting the gadgets, creating the dripping effect helps me with it and intensifying the highlights and shadows helps me to achieve it. The effects also create a sense of the unreal.

So, I guess it is why my dreams sometimes are filled with online information and it might be because my brain finds it hard to organise the information that I received within a short range of time, so it was arranging them for me when I was dreaming.

Dream Journal

This piece is simply my dream journal where about a year and a half ago, I dreamt that Mount Fuji has erupted, and I was standing in a faraway spot watching it happening. Since it is unlikely to happen and I felt lots of sensations in the dream, so I remember the scene until now.

-Estelle Chan, Y13 Gellhorn

Estelle Chan, Y13 Gellhorn

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