Oil painting: a blindfolded woman pressing her hands to her head beneath a burning sky filled with hanging bells.
Oil on canvas · from a dream

The bellswon't stop

She tied the cloth over her eyes so the fear would have nowhere to land. The sky kept ringing anyway.

This is a piece about personal paranoia — the private kind, the kind that follows you into a quiet room and starts ringing. She is not hiding from anyone else here. She is trying to make her own fear stop.

The blindfold is a wish more than a shield: to hide, to unsee her own pain and frustration, to unmake it by refusing to look. And the bells above her are the irritating noises that keep messing with her head — swinging in a sky that has caught fire, too many of them, none of them silent, all of them hers.

This painting is created entirely of a dream I had dreamed about a while ago.
What's in the frame
The blindfold

To unsee

Bound white cloth across the eyes — a hope that what isn't looked at can't keep hurting. It hides the pain and the frustration, and it hides nothing at all.

The bells

The noise that won't quiet

They hang in a burning sky with no rope to hold them. Every irritating sound that gets inside the head and keeps swinging there, long after it should have stopped.

The dream

Painted from sleep

None of this was arranged. The whole image arrived in a dream some time ago and was carried, intact, onto the canvas — the fire, the hands, the ringing.

Subject personal paranoia Medium oil on canvas Source a remembered dream