Title: The Stalker in My Sleep
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 20” x 24” x 1.5”
Year: 2025
The Stalker in My Sleep unravels like the kind of dream you can’t escape — vibrant, chaotic, and unsettling. The painted words “Who will I be when I wake” frame the piece as both question and warning. A grotesque clown sneers overhead, mocking and menacing at once, while the deer holds still in fragile innocence, alert like prey. The burning faces warp like masks that won’t fall away, the ones we wear and the ones that haunt us.
The caged box and parrot echo mimicry and confinement — voices stuck, repeated, stolen. Figures collapse and shift at the edges, caught in the blur between waking and slipping under again. The whole canvas spins like a neon fever, where joy turns sharp, and menace hides behind the carnival light.
The painting is rooted in that half-sleep state — the moment you fight your way out of a nightmare, only to slide back in and land exactly where it left off. No matter how you twist or wake yourself, the dream resets, waiting.
That is the stalker: not only a shadow out there, but the part of ourselves we can’t shake, the presence that follows us out of sleep and into daylight. The question remains, looping endlessly: when I wake, who will I be — and who will still be watching me?