Bed: The Painting

Andrew K., oil on canvas, some time around the early 2000's.

My brother's painterly aesthetic sought to capture human subjects in their most natural, candid, habitual, and quotidian postures. And his process was central, deliberate: use the camera to photograph a kind of human still life; use the photograph as the sketch of the inspired painting; and use the paintbrush to interpret, modulate, recast, or heighten the psychology of the shape, color, and composition.

One morning, or, more likely, early afternoon, as I was slowly emerging from sleep, I felt a presence in my doorway, which faced my bed in that abode at the time. I recall thinking of sleep itself a doorway, where the dream-people are ghosts of the world of wakefulness, and the real people are ghosts of the world of sleep. It turned out, of course, to be the presence of my brother wielding a camera and an idea to elevate something as mundane as his kin asleep into the subject of art. I now hang this painting in whatever bedroom wherever I dwell.

The painting has always fascinated me. No, not because I am its subject, though, indeed I have to admit that it is flattering. The painting has captivated me because my brother focused his composition and color on the blanket. The sinuous folds of the blanket are multiply suggestive to me: blue sand dunes, the surface of water, intestinal rugae, the "oceanic feeling" of which psychologists speak, and a whorling, amorphous, subsuming, inexorable mass of death.

I leave you with these images until my next post, for I think the rich, complex symbolism that I discover in the blanket anticipates my upcoming discussion on the literal and figurative dimensions of the bed in our lives and psyches.