Review

"Eternal Dance", Acrylic on Canvas.

Allison Hedgpeth
Dreams

9 a.m.-9 p.m.

West Wyandotte Library
1737 N. 82nd St.
Kansas City, KS
913.596.5800

Hours: 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday
Runs through: Jan. 4

Artist's site: http://hedgpethfineart.wordpress.com/
Gallery site: http://www.kckpl.org/FINEARTS/exhibits.htm

There's a close link between creativity and dreaming -- not merely daydreaming, but the sort that goes on while one sleeps.

A pair of horror classics -- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are literally the stuff of their respective authors' nightmares. Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed a stately pleasure-dome in Xanadu (albeit under the influence of laudanum) but managed to get down only a fragment of the vision -- a fragment we know as Kubla Khan -- before a "person on business" interrupted his poem-writing.

Paul McCartney composed Yesterday in his sleep, so the story goes, and Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles was drawn from -- well, a dream of blue turtles.

Allison Hedgepeth understands the power of dreaming, hence the title and theme of her show at West Wyandotte Library.

Painting is like dreaming, she writes.  The pictures are a result of the dream. I celebrate the human experience through visual storytelling.  Most of the image are from memory combined with life studies, photographic studies, and are brightly colored to emphasize expression rather than realism.  My offering to the viewer is the poetry of line, color, and the evocation of emotion.

Hedgpeth's lines are intricate and intertwining, her colors bright (with blue featured prominently). The emotions evoked in Dreams range from reverence to pensiveness to the outright joy of Eternal Dance, today's featured piece. At the same time, Hedgpeth's extensive use of blue gives her canvases a calm -- and yes, dreamy -- feeling.

You can catch Hedgpeth and her works together on Sunday, when the library will host an opening reception from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. That might interfere with your Sunday afternoon nap ... but there's nothing wrong with giving your own dreams the day off and enjoying someone else's.

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