Artist of the Month

1. What mediums do you use in creating your art and why did you choose that medium?

I primarily work with oil paint because it gives me the most flexibility and control. Its slow drying time allows me to continually refine and manipulate the surface over extended periods. I approach painting sessions as durational, embodied meditations, and enjoy working with a relaxed focus for long stretches at a time. Oil paint supports this process by remaining fluid and responsive throughout the session. 

2. What is the relationship between your art and dreams?

I approach artmaking as a contemplative practice. For the past two years, I’ve explored how it can support lucid dreaming practices drawn from Dream Yoga, a Vajrayana Buddhist system associated with lucid dreaming, which I’ve been engaging through contemporary teachings and historical texts. My work investigates how an art practice can help track, induce, and cultivate lucid states across sleep onset, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Each artwork functions as part of these contemplative experiments. Artmaking, Dream Yoga and neuroscience have an interesting overlap in how imagination plays a role in perception. 

3. Does creating art based on dreams influence your dreams? If so, how?

 Definitely. I structure painting sessions as extended meditation periods intended to calm and stabilize the mind before nighttime dream practices. Because of this, the act of painting influences my dreams more than the finished works themselves. 

What interests me most is the relationship between lucid dreaming and observational artmaking. To become lucid in a dream is to observe one’s surroundings to the degree that one can differentiate the dream reality from waking reality. When this habit of observation is cultivated during waking life, it can carry over into dreams and trigger lucidity. I’ve found this resembles the same heightened attention used in observational painting, and in that sense, I view observational artmaking as a form of lucid awareness. 

4. Does the dream art you create give new meaning to what the dreams are saying to you? Explain.

 Absolutely. This current way of integrating artmaking with contemplative dream practice hasn’t just given new meaning to my dreams, but also to my waking life. I’m very inspired by the reciprocal relationship Dream Yoga highlights between one’s dreaming and waking consciousness and I feel that artmaking is a powerful tool to help realize this connection. I’m experientially learning that dreams and waking reality are both experienced through the mind, and therefore both have an illusory, flexible quality to them. I find this view gives a lot of agency to the dreamer, whether awake or asleep. 

5. Do you have a short story about the creation of a particular piece of dream art?

For the painting Nov. 3rd 2025 (In the sky of mind), I was inspired by Tibetan Buddhist sky-gazing meditations and created a work composed of twenty-four consecutive one-hour sky studies completed in a single uninterrupted session. Treating the sky as an object of meditation, this work used sustained observation as both subject and method. I’ve continued the In the sky of mind series with paintings lasting anywhere from nine to twenty-four hours. 

Nov. 3rd 2025 (In the sky of mind). 2025. Oil on linen 70 x 60 x 2 in. 

After completing one of these paintings, I engage in lucid dreaming induction practices, using the prolonged act of observation as an induction method. Since the beginning of this series, I have also begun to make drawings in the sky during my lucid dreams. 

6. Anything else you would like to say about dream art?

It’s so exciting to see contemporary neuroscience increasingly engage with ancient contemplative practices in order to better understand the nature of mind and consciousness. I believe artmaking has an important place within that conversation. 

In looking at Dream Yoga, lucid dreaming, and artistic practice, I’ve noticed several shared skills across all three disciplines: observation, relaxation, intention, and visualization. There are compelling accounts of yogic practitioners using these capacities to profoundly shape their experience of mind and perception. As an artist, I’m interested in exploring these possibilities directly, and I believe artmaking is uniquely suited to that kind of investigation.