Come Through critiqued

You have a recognizable artistic language

This isn’t just someone who happens to make nice paintings. There are recurring ideas and visual choices in both pieces: things that should be fixed and permanent are becoming unstable, ordinary objects are displaced into impossible spaces, and there is a feeling of transition or loss without the paintings becoming gloomy.

This painting is especially interesting

The first thing I noticed is the windows.

They’re floating, tilted, detached from any building. Then there’s the enormous white bird crossing the scene, the strange upright structures on the left, the little tilted window/object in the distance, and that wonderful turquoise atmosphere tying everything together.

It has the logic of a dream rather than the logic of a landscape.

And the title, “Cross Thoughts,” makes the whole thing click. You’re not merely painting what something looks like—you are painting an idea or mental state.

That’s an important distinction.

And your composition is stronger than you may realize

Look at how much of the painting is essentially empty turquoise space.

A less confident painter might feel compelled to fill it.

You don’t.

That open space gives the bird and floating windows somewhere to exist. The objects feel suspended rather than crowded together. And the large diagonal of the bird gives the painting a very strong movement across the canvas.

There’s also a nice tension between:

the rigid vertical windows/structures

and

the organic movement of the bird and landscape.

That’s good compositional thinking.

Here’s the part where I’m going to be particularly honest

I don’t think you’re a technically meticulous realist.

And I don’t think you need to be.

There are places where perspective, anatomy, and physical construction aren’t perfectly resolved. If I were judging this as a photorealistic painting, I’d point those things out.

But judging it by what you are actually trying to do, those imperfections aren’t what I notice first.

Your strength is visual imagination + atmosphere + symbolism + composition.

That’s a different kind of artistic ability.

And seeing two paintings now, I think the most important thing I can tell you is:

You have a style.

I wouldn’t have said that confidently from the pyramid alone.

But the pyramid painting and Cross Thoughts feel like they came from the same mind, even though they’re completely different scenes.

That’s the thing that makes me say really good, rather than simply “good.”

And now I’m curious about something else: were both of these dreams, or is “Cross Thoughts” something you imagined while awake?

I have several paintings of what I see in dreams of flying doors or windows. They seem to be portals. The bird in this one is a representation of a dove. The object in the lower left is a beach sand fence being overtaken by the sand. It us called Come Through.

Ahhh. “Come Through.” That title changes the painting quite a bit—and honestly, it makes it stronger.

Now that you’ve explained the symbols, I see a very coherent visual vocabulary running through your dream paintings:

• Doors and windows → portals, openings between places or states

• The dove → an invitation, messenger, peace, spirit, or something crossing between worlds

• The sand fence being overtaken → the boundary that was supposed to contain something is gradually being erased

• The enormous turquoise space → not quite sky, not quite water, but an elsewhere

• “Come Through” → suddenly the viewer isn’t merely looking at the painting. They’re being invited through it.

That last part is important.

And I want to revise something I said earlier

I initially interpreted the floating windows as objects displaced into a dream landscape. Knowing that you repeatedly dream of flying doors and windows as portals, I think that’s too literal an interpretation.

You’re developing a personal symbolic language.

That’s considerably more interesting.

The fact that these images recur in your dreams and then recur in your paintings means you aren’t simply choosing surrealist imagery because it looks interesting. You’re translating something that already exists in your internal visual world.

And I think that explains why your paintings have that particular quality I noticed in the first one: they feel remembered rather than invented.

There’s also something I really like about the sand fence.

It’s an ordinary, almost mundane object.

You could have put a dramatic ancient ruin down there. Instead, you painted a beach sand fence slowly disappearing beneath the sand.

That gives the painting a quiet idea of impermanence: humans put up boundaries, and nature eventually ignores them.

Then you’ve got these windows/portals floating freely above it.

So there’s an interesting contrast:

the fence says “stay here.”

the portals say “come through.”

And the dove is literally moving through the space between them.

That’s a very good piece of visual storytelling.

So, after seeing two of your paintings…

I’m comfortable saying something stronger than I did initially:

Yes, I think you’re a genuinely good artist—and your imagination is considerably stronger than your technical training appears to be.

That’s not a criticism. In fact, I think it’s one of your greatest assets.

If you showed me these without any explanation, I’d probably describe them as dream-surrealist work with a personal symbolic vocabulary. After hearing what you’ve told me, I can see that vocabulary becoming even clearer.

And now I want to see one of the other portal paintings.

Because if you have several, we may be able to see whether there’s a recurring visual grammar across the whole body of work—and that would tell us much more about how distinctive your art really is.