Currently on view at Roq La Rue in Seattle, Washington is artist John Brophy's solo exhibition, "Sleepwalker."

Brophy's unusual painting style is due to his highly labor intensive creation process. Each work is first digitally rendered in a 3d modeling program by Brophy - with every detail added, arranged and lit inside the program. Once Brophy is satisfied with the image, he then uses that as a guide to completely recreate the image by hand in oil paint on panel, often making his own oil paints and finishes from scratch. His strict adherence to recreating the digital image creates a strange discordance- a sense of "uncanny valley"- we obviously know the "characters" portrayed but cause us to question what we really know about them, what is real and what is projected by the viewer.

“When I was a kid, I loved The Beatles. Their songs felt so perfectly formed that they seemed discovered rather than created. I often wondered which came first—the music or the lyrics. Years later, watching Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back, I found an answer, or at least one answer. The film shows Paul McCartney discovering “Get Back” in real time: the guitar pattern, the rhythm, and the lyrics all emerging together from the same instinctive place beneath conscious thought. For me, this is the essence of making art. Creation does not arrive as a fully formed idea but rises from the subconscious—an internal black box where decisions are made before we are even aware of them. This state is most accessible in dreams, when conscious control is at its weakest. While dreams are private experiences, the creative act allows traces of that inner world to be shared.

Sleepwalkers explores the duality between dreaming and making. The figures in these paintings exist in a suspended state, where image and meaning emerge simultaneously—like music and lyrics discovered together in the act of creation.” - John Brophy