“Blinding” (oil on canvas, 27.5" x 20”)

Evelyn Doll has been working since 1989 as a freelance painter and has had numerous art exhibitions in Austria, London and Croatia. She studied psychology and did dream research with Michael Schredl (Mannheim, Germany) in 1996. Since that time, dreaming has become the interface between painting and psychology in her work. In 2000 she received her degree in psychology from the University of Vienna; her diploma work focuses on lucid dreaming. Since then she is a co-worker at the Institute of Consciousness and Dream Research (Vienna, Austria) with Brigitte Holzinger.

Artist Statement

Painting should create a link between dream and waking life reality. My first dream series were surrealistic and contained concrete elements with symbolic character; in recent years liberation from concrete meanings by means of abstraction has taken place.

Dream images start with a thought. Thoughts are sentences that give direction to a kind of inner movement. Concrete objects or symbols appear on certain points of these movements and disappear on others. What is perceived as real over the course of time is the movement itself that does not stop. Hence abstraction is seen as liberation from the illusion that reality has to be concrete. The pictures show the transition of the perception of a form into the perception of the movement itself. This is what perception in dreaming and waking life have in common.