Balancing the Dream - Sam Collins

Medium: Acrylics and masonry brush painted on plywoodDimensions: 35” x 48” Description: Suspended between grayscale and colour, Balancing the Dream captures the delicate harmony between innocence and imagination. A child rendered in monochrome, pure and introspective, gently clings to a vividly painted flamingo—an embodiment of nature, wonder, and surreal escape. The visual contrast speaks to the way children straddle both the real and the imagined, grounding themselves in dreams while exploring the unknown. Subtle drips of paint and orbiting colour spheres allude to collapsing possibilities—like particles observed into being. The scene becomes a quiet metaphor for quantum perception: where parallel realities, memory, and imagination blur into one. In this moment, the child might be both dreaming and awake, balanced on the threshold of multiple worlds. Balancing the Dream invites viewers to recall their own inner child—the one who instinctively trusted the surreal, who lived in quantum uncertainty without fear, and who found balance in the beautifully improbable. Collection Overview In this collection, Sam Art weaves a visual language of wonder, tension, and quiet rebellion—where children perch on flamingos, snails bear the burden of paradox, and sunflowers dare to breach their borders. At first glance, these works are playful, almost dreamlike. But look again, and you’ll find something deeper humming beneath the surface: a meditation on perception, duality, and the fragile nature of peace—both personal and collective.The theme that binds these works is the space between—between conflict and calm, reality and imagination, observation and existence. Through recurring contrasts of monochrome and vivid colour, structured boundaries and organic escape, each painting explores how reality is shaped not just by what is, but by how we see. This idea, borrowed from quantum physics, becomes a metaphor for emotional truth: that peace, hope, and even identity are not fixed destinations, but shimmering possibilities, waiting to collapse into form through attention and intention.  “Wishful Peaceful” and “A Recipe for Peace” ground the series in emotional and geopolitical reality. They acknowledge the weight of conflict, yet suggest that peace is a particle of potential—a fleeting moment that must be chosen again and again.  “Balancing the Dream” and “Probability Cloud” lift the viewer into a more surreal dimension, where childhood becomes the observer that determines reality. These paintings don’t just represent innocence—they reframe it as a powerful, quantum force capable of creating worlds.  “When the Frame Forgot to Hold Us” completes the arc with a subtle rebellion against limitation itself. It questions the very nature of framing—of categorizing, labeling, containing. Here, life pushes out of bounds, not in violence, but in joy. Together, these works suggest that peace is not just a political ideal, but a perceptual one. That imagination is not the opposite of reality, but a tool for reshaping it. And that within each of us lives a kind of observer—quiet, curious, and capable of collapsing the infinite into something beautifully real.