In the 1970s-80s, Rita Wolff painted a series of watercolors of dreams. Thirty or so were published in a book with this grandiose claim:

Although she is self-taught and has only been painting for a dozen years it can be said that Wolff has extended that art by a new category; because unlike the dream-like subjects of surrealism, Wolff creates pictorial records of actual dreams, of her own, of friends and acquaintances.

As if nobody ever painted or drew an actual dream before 1975!

Her real innovation is the high proportion of other people's dreams that Rita illustrated. She wasn't first; Henri Rousseau's famous The Dream was his friend Yadwigha's dream, not his own. But it's rare. Maddeningly, the book undercuts this genuine originality by omitting the "actual dreams" that the paintings illustrate--removing the other half of the collaboration!

So all you get is this atmospheric rendering of... some dream experience. Is that someone Ken saw in the dream, or Ken himself? Are those silly black four-toed duck-feet Rita's conception of swim fins, or Ken's? Does the air-swimmer go out the window and explore the city? We don't know.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Rita Wolff: Watercolours, 1974-1985 by Rita Wolff, 1986; St Martin's Press, NY (Plate XXVI). Plate's title is Ken's Dream; the introduction calls it Kenneth's Dream.

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