Dayworld Rebel 1987

Don Ivan Punchatz made this fantastical scene with oils, and I wonder about his process of layering color to create such a dreamy picture. The ochre sky seems to have been scumbled on, built up with thin washes of paint so that the surface appears to glow from within. The characters are drawn from such different realms—a monk, a woman with a ray gun, a magician—as though Punchatz was riffing on some wild science fiction narrative. Maybe that’s where he found his freedom. There’s a casualness to the brushwork here, a sense of playful exploration with how the story is told. It's got the spirit of someone like Philip Guston, who also dove head-first into weird, imaginative scenes. Seeing this makes me want to make a painting that gives me the same sense of possibility. It reminds me that art's greatest gift is that it can bring anything into being.