The Dream We Live With 1994

Ernie Barnes made this enigmatic painting, The Dream We Live With, with paint on canvas. Look at how Barnes has built up this surface. It’s loose and gestural, and kind of unresolved, like a sketch that’s been allowed to live as a painting. And what is this scene? The three figures seem to be moving along, but they’re surrounded by these little white bursts. Is it gunfire? Flashes of light? It makes you wonder about the relationship between the figures. Notice the color palette is fairly muted, dominated by browns and pinks. But then you’ve got these vivid turquoise moments in the sky and in the woman’s blouse. These accents are beautifully jarring, and give the painting a strange and slightly unsettling energy. Barnes was deeply inspired by the Ashcan School painters, like John Sloan and George Bellows, who portrayed urban life with grit and empathy. But like them, Barnes also leaves so much to the imagination, so that the process of seeing it becomes part of its meaning.