How they dream: Dan Griggs’s sleeping women

Dan Griggs is enamored of a time out of time. Women, asleep, lie unencumbered by the thoughts of the day, their skin as fair as a Bonnard blush. Often they have tossed aside lingerie in scenes that appear lightly flushed with the afterglow of an erotic encounter. Their heads are covered, so that they appear masked, or confrontational without being revealed.

The women are nameless yet highly sanctified. They sleep, rest or pose artfully inside rooms that bear precise, period touches: a pewter decanter, a glass orb, a panel of stained glass. The paintings are, perhaps, not fully conscious of themselves, as we are not fully conscious of ourselves acting in the world. Freud spoke of the uncanny, the latent content of dreams in which, for example, he dreamed a pair of eyeglasses, and then saw the first pair overlaid by a second pair, in a double vision of magnification.

Likewise, in Griggs’s work, what is magnified is also, paradoxically, elusive: The eyes of the painter, and the subjectivities of his anonymous sitters conduct a relationship as finely grained as powder. For Griggs is a delicate painter, using a fine brush to capture fine details: the color of hair, the flush on a cheek, wrinkled bedding. He invites us into the privacy of his studio in which women nap, or pose on chairs wearing accessories like a pink chiffon head wrap or a bird-beaked mask. Who has dressed them? To whom is the woman in The Room supplicating as she falls forward onto the floor, wearing a long black skirt and no shirt, as paper peels off the wall and the symmetry of her enclosure appears to crumble?

To look closely into Griggs’s paintings shows that there is often an external element, a disharmony interfering with the trance. Yet the trance is very deliberately conjured. It is the painter’s ode to perfection, repose, homage to female beauty. Will it hold? The paintings themselves hold the palpable tension of the question.

I, for example, cannot hide that I dislike the prerogative a male artist assumes to show women sleeping, their bras and panties tossed into the foreground of my view. To look at women with their wrists bound or their heads wrapped in poses alliterative of hostages makes me deeply uncomfortable. Yet I am aware that my bad thoughts emanate from my own experiences that every idyll has a shadow.

What, alternatively, compels me in these works, with their impressive technical skill and their nods to Dutch interiors and women enjoying the quiet of untrammeled time, is that they function in our postmodern era as a dream of the missed connection. For who can look in, and not be titillated? Who is not rendered curious by the form of she who lies unspeaking, insensible to regard? These paintings involve us because they suggest that the visible inscribes a line of defense against what can really be observed of another’s experience.

Griggs is clearly involved in the very close observation of the detail: the way a room is decorated, how it holds off the outside, with what care or literary allowances a space speaks its images into the world. What is my friend dreaming? With what intention has she dressed or undressed? Why is she veiled?

The questions compel a long exhalation in front of this work that confronts us. For we do not know the answers. We know only that the care the painter has given the surface suggests a place not entirely real, not entirely admissible to daylight.

As such, Griggs’s paintings are like riddles for the postmodern era. They propose to bridge the breached spaces between us. With dual meanings, they are at once presumptuous enough to exult the thought, and humble enough to leave her to her dreams. Art tends to conduct such random interferences. May we play with the static that ensues, imbuing it with our own nimble associations.


Ellen Berkovitch is a writer, art historian and a Ph.D. student in depth psychology.