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Listmakers Unite

Get out those to-do lists and see how many items remain unchecked!

As another year draws to a close, we celebrate Still-Need-To-Do Day! This monotype by Enrique Chagoya conveys the senses of anxiety and urgency that correspond with to-do lists and unforgiving deadlines.

Enrique Chagoya's interest in sequential imagery led him to print one image on top of another, letting early impressions show through as pentimenti. In Life Is a Dream, Then You Wake Up, the artist used multiple layers of imagery to express the borders of the physical and the spiritual, life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, as well as the various cultures with which he personally identifies. The winking, open and closed eyes and the shifting positions of the facial features suggest a cinematic sequence that telescopes the passage of time in a single image.

Source: Joann Moser. Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1997) at http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/monotypes/index.html.

Pictured: Enrique Chagoya, born Mexico 1953, Life Is a Dream, Then You Wake Up, 1995, color monotype on handmade Amate bark paper, 42 5/8 x 46 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, C. W. Tazewell, and Mr. and Mrs. G. Mennan Williams.