Like many artists of her era, MacIver often explored the realm of sleeping and dreams as an avenue into other consciousness and deeper truth. It is perhaps because of this focus that she was often, especially early on in her career, wrongfully categorized as a surrealist. MacIver painted her dreams and visions into scenes of everyday life, the resulting works taking many forms and styles throughout her lifetime. The great variety of style throughout her career makes her a consistently difficult painter to categorize, as you can see in the unexpected, fairly figural painting of Lloyd Frankenberg sleeping below, in contrast to the dreamy, ghost-like visions that she would begin to paint in the 40s and 50s.
"A Dream: The E/L train with sad streaked windows gliding past like the mournful sound of trains in the night"
"Dream: Completely blue studio / every variety of blue"
Sleep, 1929, oil on linen, 20 1/16 x 24 1/16 in
This painting was given to the Smith College Museum of Art by Loren MacIver in 1977, in memory of Lloyd Frankenberg, closely following his death. It is a deeply intimate portrait which stands out amongst MacIver's work both in terms of style and subject matter.
Sandman and Sleep Sketches
This page shows two sketches, one for a "Sandman" painting, a favorite theme of MacIver's, and one for "Sleep," the painting of Lloyd sleeping that is on the previous slide.
Sleeping--Day Dreams
This sketch shows one of MacIver's many attempts to capture the very fiber of dreams within her work. Rather than representing this through the dream scapes of her surrealist contemporaries, in this sketch she uses abstract forms, and "large swaths of color dragged over a -- surface"