The fine line

between
imagination
and reality

Dafna Moriya

Dafna Moriya

Dafna Moriya, PhD, founder of the Center for Art-based Research and Change, is an artist, independent scholar and educator. Moriya gives lectures and leads workshops around the world. She teaches and supervises art-based researchers, art therapy practitioners and supervisors, is involved in art-based activities for social change, and exhibits her own art work.

In her artwork, she examines the nonverbal force of creativity and encourages the viewer to remain within the metaphorical level without translating images into words. Her allowing the elements of an artwork to occur, as if independently of her will, generates interplay between her painting activity and the developments unfolding on the canvas. During the work process on planned patterns, unplanned new elements suddenly burst forth, conquering areas in the painting and embellishing the canvas with colorful aesthetic beauty, an expanse of time and a window into the mind.

In Transitional Space #2, painting is a journey into the depths, and every artwork is a voyage to a different level. The painting creates a kind of world unto itself, its size suited to the length and deepness of the voyage. Each time a new element appears in a painting, it tries to reproduce, spread, and take over more space through its own rhythm and movement. It runs up against other elements residing there and decides whether to stop, bypass, or overrun them, sometimes covering and destroying them, sometimes symbiotically integrating with them.

01.Transitional space #2

02.Black & White, Almost

In Black & White, almost Moriya creates a monochromatic world of movement and rhythm – in black and white – enabling the colorful element to integrate within it. These paintings resemble, in her view, one voice solo singing compared to the rich choire of hues in Transitional space #1 and Transitional space #2.

This body of artwork was inspired by the idea that carefully observing daily occurrences over time, in a given space and according to a set format, allows touching on the evasive time-space continuum - and possibly achieving the sense of a higher spatial dimension.

03.Transitional space #1

04.Namaste

In this series, Dafna Moriya collects and records moments from her journeys to India. As in the blessing Namaste , her paintings honor the light in the moment and the light in man in depictions of simple daily occurrences interspersed with moments of prayer and holiness.

05.Concealment for Growth

In this project Moriya painted over the pages of an old book, concealing much of its content in order to allow new elements to emerge.