Artist’s statement on the illustrations

Stylistically, I wanted the drawings to appear both serious and cartoonish, eerie and familiar, hazy and direct. These themes came to me because of both the odd feelings I have about this time and this virus, as well as my understanding of dreams. 

While the minutiae of life has not changed much—we still have to feed ourselves, go to the hardware store, and deal with loss and success—the ways in which we do these things has changed. I think about this often while I walk through the grocery store: the familiarity of the place juxtaposed with the eerie foreignness of the experience during shelter-in-place. I sought to capture these feelings in how I designed these pictures. 

Dreams themselves are both narrative and lack narrative, an idea that I wanted to portray stylistically. Dreams make sense while we experience them but often seem outlandish once we return to them with our waking minds. We experience our dreams vividly while we are sleeping, but so often when we try to recall them just hours later they are fleeting or clouded. Some details slip away into the fog while others are as clear as day. Something about this half-experiencing of dreams makes them more personal, and I do my best to capture that in both style and subject. 

When choosing what to draw for a selected dream, I usually pick what stands out the most to me about a submission. Sometimes it is the setting, what I imagine from what is described by the dreamer. Sometimes it is an object presented in the submission. These are obviously my own understandings of the dreams, and may not accurately represent the dreamer’s experience. I am doing an artistic rendering of what I interpret from the dreams.

You may notice that there are no people depicted in the illustrations. I chose to exclude people from my drawings to capture what quarantine and social distancing feels like to most of us: living in a world devoid of regular interaction with other people. Because of this choice, when submissions focus only on human interactions, I cannot draw those dreams.

Initially I approached illustration with the goal of creating a drawing for every dream submitted. Due to the amazing quantity of submissions and sometimes the content of the dreams, I will not be able to illustrate every dream that is submitted, nor every dream that is selected to be shared on the site. 

Finally, I wanted to thank you all for so generously sharing your dreams and experiences with us. In a time that leaves me feeling a bit lost and unmotivated, it is so nice to have a project that is both an artistic outlet and allows me to feel connected to the experiences of folks around the world. Stay safe and be well.

-Grace

To learn more about the artist and see more of her work, you can visit her portfolio.