Dreamers Dreaming, 1985
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 100
23 x 30 in
Collaborative Printer: Bob Franklin
Jack Gerber's Dreamers Dreaming places us inside the logic of a dream itself — where a single woman multiplies across the composition, appearing in three model-like poses in the upper register before settling into a larger, recumbent form at the bottom of the print, resting beneath flowers arranged in a decorated vase. A dog sits nearby, its head turned outward beyond the picture plane, as though keeping watch at the boundary between the interior world of the image and the one outside it.
Gerber builds this world through crosshatching, a technique he employs not for precision but for atmosphere, giving the figures an organic, impressionistic quality that keeps them from ever fully resolving into stillness. The palette does the rest. Vivid and restless, the color moves through the composition the way feeling moves through a body, generating warmth and unease in equal measure.
The title, Dreamers Dreaming, appears inscribed in the upper right corner along the border of the print, rendered in Gerber's own hand and in his characteristically charged color. It reads less like a caption than a confession. His work has always concerned itself with the interior life, with love and memory and the kind of uncertainty that doesn't resolve so much as it deepens. This print is no exception.
