Mary Dykstra - Painting series title: Innocent When You Dream

[About]

These paintings are made of filtered memories, snippets of stories, lyrics that landed, waking Technicolor dreams, inspirations embraced, visions tackled.

They offer a plan of action for catching shooting stars before they fade out of sight. Make a wish. Repeat. The wish is to make something as compelling as that shooting star.

In my paintings, you meet characters and make-believe worlds that suggest a story unfolding —pictorial tales with a surreal, nostalgic bent. They take you back to the mid twentieth century, like music from an old record player. There is static and distortion, but also warmth. They revisit familiar places but everything is altered by experience, by memory, and is haunted by mutations of characters you met back in childhood.

In these worlds, all is well and good, as long as you indulge the ghosts from time to time. They come to play.