The Color of My Dreams

Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983). Photo: This Is the Color of My Dreams, 1925. Oil on canvas; 38 x 51 in. (96.5 x 129.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Pierre and Maria–Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 (2002.456.5). © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

«In celebration of the 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards exhibition, now on view in the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education, the Teen Blog will feature guest posts by Scholastic Gold Key Award writers from New York City through the close of the exhibition on May 17. This week's blogger, Amelie, was awarded a Gold Key for her personal essay/memoir, "The White Light."»

What makes great works of art, from Edvard Munch's The Scream to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, so everlasting? Some works of art feel timeless—they touch a certain part of the human soul no matter what century it is. These works move us profoundly and expand our insight by expressing a truth that we carry within ourselves—the painting Photo: This Is the Color of My Dreams by Joan Miró does this for me.

The canvas is nearly empty, feels vast, and has the word "photo" in one corner, written in beautiful calligraphy. There is a cloud-like spot of paint in a brilliant shade of blue in the other corner, and below it there are a few words written on thin, almost invisible lines in a delicate script that seems to have come from an old schoolbook: "Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves," meaning "this is the color of my dreams." The color blue may have embodied a place where Miró's mind and dreams flowed without boundaries, and maybe his dreams were tinted in this particular shade of blue.

My imagination runs wild when I think about this painting. I imagine a steady flow of images and memories that create a dew-coated world, where it's always spring—a blue spring. There are indigo raindrops suspended in the air like a frozen web of color. Some are just an inch away from hitting the ground, and others are so high up that they cannot be seen, but they are always there, like silent ghosts watching over me. There is a stream that has stopped running—colored with shades of sapphire and shades of steel—and a blue train stands next to the stream. That train can take me anywhere, and I never know where I'll go when I get on it, but I enjoy the wonder and thrill of not knowing. There are no clouds in the immense cobalt sky, and sometimes, in my dreams, my eyes and hair are cobalt, too. Once, I dreamed of a blue moon in the sky, and I saw my reflection in it. Blue sunflowers tower over everything from where I stand, and cornflowers and forget-me-nots embrace the sky, while blueberry bushes and azure trees with cyan plums stand in clusters. Grains of lapis lazuli, sapphire, and ice-blue topaz make the ground glow, and the world around me slowly unfolds in a hazy indigo light. My dreams are blue, too.

What color are your dreams?

For more teen writing, please visit the exhibition in the Uris Center for Education!