Artist of the Month

Looking Forward

Lynn Imperatore

www.lynnimperatore.co.uk

Dr. Lynn Imperatore is an artist/researcher who received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Design, University of the West of England (UWE) in 2015. She holds a BA from New York University, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate art, has exhibited widely and is co-founder and co-editor of the HATCH/Drawing Research Project. Her Ph.D., 'Out of the corner of the eye (the 'I'): Drawing as disposition of perception' is a practice-based interrogation of drawing's potential to apprehend and articulate unexpected edges of perception.

**Cover image: The Illuminated Sleeper by Lynn Imperatore**
Graphite and gouache on paper, 142cm x 107cm (56in x 42in)

For Herbology News, Lynn writes:

In his essay Oneiric Space, Gaston Bachelard describes our entry into slumber: 'No sooner do we fall asleep than space relaxes and falls asleep, too— doing so a little ahead of us, losing its struts and fibers, losing its structural forces and geometric coherence...A space that abandons its horizons, draws in on itself, becomes rounded and enveloped is a space that trusts in the power of the core of its being.'

**Sleeping Around by Lynn Imperatore**
Graphite, ink, and gouache on paper, 107cm x 76cm (42in x 30in)

A dream— as something we have seen —emerges from a terrain of imagination and is comprised of perceptual inputs that have not traversed the more familiar (waking) pathway from retina to visual cortex. Psychologist James Hillman (1979) considered the dream as a 'call from imagination to imagination and can be answered only by imagination.' From a lifelong engagement with drawing, I've recognised drawing's similarities as artefact of imaginal composition. One will find that even when drawing from direct observation, what transpires in the intervals between the looking out and the assembling of marks upon the awaiting page is a reconfiguration that externalises the interior imaginative response.

**Sleep Study by Lynn Imperatore**
Graphite, ink, and gouache on paper, 107cm x 76cm (42in x 30in)

Decades ago, I had recurring dreams during which I made large charcoal drawings, and so I began to make large charcoal drawings based upon dreams. I drew not in order to analyse dream content, but rather as a way to extend the dreamlike quality of image generation. From this process, I came to understand drawing itself as a form of waking dream— with its sensory detours away from ordinary consciousness which are not all that dissimilar to that everyday mystery of sleeping life. Then, later still, when my talent for sleep eluded me, I drew (upon) my unmade bed in prayerful entreaty for sleep's return.

**Tintoretto's Alarm Clock by Lynn Imperatore**
Graphite and ink on paper, 142cm x 107cm (9in x 10in)

Thus, I approach drawing as a kind of explorer's journey, one where encounter between perception and imagination can expand understanding of what it means to see. Central to such investigations is a shared visual language within the sleight-of-hand of both drawing and dreaming— each an imaginative activity where impossible imagery can lead to richer apprehensions of interior life. Drawing and dreaming are practices of perception which discern and delineate qualities of the mysterious as embedded and embodied within the ordinary. These magical manifestations open onto broader imaginative territories— ones which wait just over the edge of a page or on the other side of the nightly nod into sleep.