'Point of Dream' at Elmhurst Art Museum
The Elmhurst Artists' Guild will sponsor "The Point of the Dream," featuring original dot paintings by EAG board member Peter M. Steeves, from July 15 through Aug. 10 at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 S. Cottage Hill Ave.
A public opening reception will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, July 20, where residents can meet the artist and learn about his style and somnambulistic paintings.
Steeves, who lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, and works in Naperville, is a self-taught artist with a career that has spanned more than 25 years exhibiting throughout the area. His work includes elements of surrealism, primitive symbolic and postmodern realism focusing on the emotion of images and pointillistic, dot patterns. The subjects of the paintings are pulled from his subconscious and transferred to the canvas to allow both artist and viewer to analyze the meaning.
Unlike pointillist artists such as Seurat, Signac and Van Gogh, who employed dots of paint (points) to create soft, impressionist images, Steeves' pointillistic style has evolved to be more akin to Australian Aboriginal art.
"What started out as an homage to the Australian Aboriginal art method of dot painting has grown to have a life of its own through my eyes and paints," Steeves said. "The dots went from being the background of traditional paintings to the focus of my paintings."
That approach is evident in "Dusk Dreaming," a warm, ethereal composition in blue, green, white, black and purple that Steeves painted while working in Melbourne, Australia.
The dot patterns invoke a dreamlike impression of the subject, allowing the viewer to focus on the emerging repetitious patterns. The multicolor dot patterns are captivating, warm and personal. The points provide movement to the sky, waves and water.
The absence of points, negative space, is used to create a tree, cloud, human or architectural figure, as employed in "Night Forest II" and "The Long Way," which evoke a forest after a fire, with blackened bare trees and a rich, vibrant undergrowth unleashed by the devastating, but nourishing, fire.
Steeves' work brings out the imagery of our forgotten dreams.
"When we dream, there are no good or bad dreams; your imagination runs free," he said. "Images that you recognize when awake take on different, deeper meanings in slumber. When you awake, you wish you could see, hear, or feel what you just experienced, but you are left with a mere fragment.
"My goal is to permit viewers to explore their own sub-conscience as they are torn back to reality from a dream. The driving force behind my art is that it is cheaper than therapy for both the artist and the collectors!"
His work can be seen on the web at www.TerrapinHouseStudio.com.
Paintings can be viewed and purchased during regular museum hours from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and free for EAM and EAG members, students and children younger than 18. All visitors are admitted free on the first Friday of each month.
For details, visit elmhurstartistsguild.org or elmhurstartmuseum.org.