Mud Dream
“Mud Dream” by Katie Elkins is a surreal, soft-lit oil painting that evokes the sensory pull of memory and earth. The composition unfolds like a hazy recollection—wet, warm, and half-lucid. A shifting sky of ochre, mauve, and cloud-white reflects in shimmering pools of pink and grey, pulling the eye toward a pair of barely-there figures half-submerged in a marshy basin. Their presence is subtle, almost imagined, as if part of the landscape’s own unconscious.
Mossy greens and charcoal blacks bleed into one another, forming hazy tree lines and amorphous shadows that teeter between foliage and fog. The brushwork is fluid and intuitive, dreamlike in its resistance to fixed form. Like much of Elkins’ work, Mud Dream holds tension between wildness and intimacy, play and peril.
There’s a childlike joy here—mud between toes, water over skin—but it’s laced with something ancient, too. This is a dream remembered by the land itself.
27×17
“Mud Dream” by Katie Elkins is a surreal, soft-lit oil painting that evokes the sensory pull of memory and earth. The composition unfolds like a hazy recollection—wet, warm, and half-lucid. A shifting sky of ochre, mauve, and cloud-white reflects in shimmering pools of pink and grey, pulling the eye toward a pair of barely-there figures half-submerged in a marshy basin. Their presence is subtle, almost imagined, as if part of the landscape’s own unconscious.
Mossy greens and charcoal blacks bleed into one another, forming hazy tree lines and amorphous shadows that teeter between foliage and fog. The brushwork is fluid and intuitive, dreamlike in its resistance to fixed form. Like much of Elkins’ work, Mud Dream holds tension between wildness and intimacy, play and peril.
There’s a childlike joy here—mud between toes, water over skin—but it’s laced with something ancient, too. This is a dream remembered by the land itself.
27×17
“Mud Dream” by Katie Elkins is a surreal, soft-lit oil painting that evokes the sensory pull of memory and earth. The composition unfolds like a hazy recollection—wet, warm, and half-lucid. A shifting sky of ochre, mauve, and cloud-white reflects in shimmering pools of pink and grey, pulling the eye toward a pair of barely-there figures half-submerged in a marshy basin. Their presence is subtle, almost imagined, as if part of the landscape’s own unconscious.
Mossy greens and charcoal blacks bleed into one another, forming hazy tree lines and amorphous shadows that teeter between foliage and fog. The brushwork is fluid and intuitive, dreamlike in its resistance to fixed form. Like much of Elkins’ work, Mud Dream holds tension between wildness and intimacy, play and peril.
There’s a childlike joy here—mud between toes, water over skin—but it’s laced with something ancient, too. This is a dream remembered by the land itself.
27×17