Three paintings from JoCa's Dreamer series shown side by side: The Dreamer (2), (7) and (19)

The Dreamer: one gesture, painted nineteen times

Some series are a set of variations. This one is closer to a single gesture, repeated until it gives something up.

Every painting called The Dreamer shows the same situation: a head, usually tilted back, with the face wiped out across the eyes. The mouth almost always survives. Nothing else is guaranteed. The numbering runs at least to nineteen, and six of them are currently on this site.

What changes across the series is not the pose. It is the character of the obliteration — and that turns out to be the whole subject.

First it is a smear

The Dreamer (2) by JoCa, oil on canvas, face smeared horizontally with a red band across the eyes on a dark ground
The Dreamer (2) — oil on canvas.

The Dreamer (2) is the blunt one. Head-on, almost frontal, against a ground so dark it reads as a hole. The face has been dragged sideways and a bar of red sits where the eyes should be, like something has been struck out rather than blurred. The white collar underneath stays perfectly calm.

It is the least dreamlike painting in a series called The Dreamer. The violence is in the paint itself — you can see the drag.

Then it becomes weather

The Dreamer (7) by JoCa, oil on canvas, head tilted back with hair and cloud sweeping across the face
The Dreamer (7) — oil on canvas.

By the middle of the series — (5), (6), (7) — the head has tipped back and the grounds have gone pale: dawn blues, sea greens. The thing crossing the face is no longer a strike. It is a mass of hair and cloud moving left to right, and it is genuinely beautiful.

Something worth noticing here, because it complicates the easy reading: in several of these the eyes are visible, and they are closed. The face is not being hidden from us. It is turned away, deliberately, into something private. These are the most restful paintings in the series, and the only ones where the figure looks like it chose this.

Then it hardens into a glitch

The Dreamer (19) by JoCa, oil on canvas, horizontal bands of pink and cream cutting across the face with painted blossoms at the temple
The Dreamer (19) — oil on canvas.

In The Dreamer (19) the softness is gone. What crosses the eyes now is a set of hard horizontal bands — pink, cream, bone — with clean edges, the visual language of a corrupted file rather than of weather. Blossoms sit at the temple. The ground has picked up vertical striations, like something has run.

This is the version that connects the series to everything else in the work: the same interference that cuts across the faces in Echoes of Haworth, and the streaked heads of the Seed paintings. The Dreamer (17) sits between the two registers — warmer, ochre and rose, the sweep still soft but starting to comb into lines.

Why repeat it nineteen times

Because the pose is not the point. A painter who wanted to paint a tilted head would have stopped after two.

What is being tested is how much you can take away and still have a person. The smear removes everything and leaves a mouth. The cloud removes the eyes but grants privacy. The glitch removes the face and replaces it with a surface error — the specific way a digital image fails, rendered slowly in oil by hand.

Nineteen attempts is what it takes to find out that the answer keeps changing.

The available works from the series are on the originals page. For anything not listed, use the contact page.

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