Diane Rusnak

Diane Rusnak is a San Fransisco Bay Area artist who has been working primarily from dreams for the past fifteen years.
Although the medium varies (drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media), the subject matter remains the same: night dreams. She shows nationally and internationally, and teaches painting at Vista College in Berkeley, CA.

Artist's Statement

I’ve recorded more than 3,000 dreams, including 85 images of cloth and laundry hanging on the line. My first laundry dream was 25 years ago, so this is a long-lasting personal symbol.

For “Cloth Dreams,” over 45 individual units are hung on clothesline or in quilt formation on the wall. One can hang the whole set or any part of it.

Each unit is 17” square. Photo transfers of laundry images (by other artists as well as myself) are put on old fashioned handkerchiefs (donated by friends) that have been sewn on new restaurant napkins. The 17” white napkin makes the uniform size. Around the border of each napkin I have hand-written an individual dream text of mine, containing a strong image of cloth, laundry, or clothing.

I have been a dream-based artist for many years and have written down over 2,000 night dreams, and developed themes from hundreds of them into artworks in acrylic paint, colored pencil drawings, collages, and sculpture.
Most, but not all of my work comes from this rich imaginary night world which I believe brings messages from the soul, the deeper self. Any fragment of a dream can be a window into this other realm.
Repetitive dreams are particularly powerful and call out to be acknowledged, transformed, and integrated into waking life.
These images have been visitors from the often obscure, veiled dream world. I have been compelled to give them a shape, a container, to fix them in time and space so that I can remember them, see them, learn from them, thus knowing life more holistically.

Laser prints of dream drawings collaged on wood or cardboard with paint.

Acrylic on Muslin