Adriana Seserko | A Dream Within A Dream
A Dream Within A Dream 2025
99 x 79 cm
Synthetic polymer paint on birch panel
Signed
$6,600
On the 5th of May 2024, my dearest grandfather passed away surround by loved ones in a room on the 10th floor at Canberra Hospital. It was a chilly day, a persistent wind plucked at the crimson, gold, and rust coloured leaves and discarded them unceremoniously on the city streets. The sun hid behind a veil of silver grey, whilst an afternoon shower heightened the sense of foreboding. My world seemed sapped of all colour, replaced instead by a dark unforgiving reality. As I watched my mum fall apart and wail at the realisation of her father’s departure, I confronted the stark realisation that all I understood before was false. Of course, I knew that death happened to us all. We are born and we must die. Its unavoidable. What I hadn’t factored into the equation was that time waited for no one, for you must understand, although I knew death was a certainty, I also believed I had a million years to live, that time was on my side. I felt that death happened to others, not to myself or my loved ones. My impenetrable tower built on misguided beliefs would shake and lose a brick or two from time to time as I confronted the loss of a beloved pet, but I would patch it up and so the tower continued to stand tall. A little less stable than it had been before perhaps but upright all the same. It really was only a matter of time before my false sense of security was shaken to the point of utter collapse, and when it did, there I lay in the centre of the ruin, my heart shattered into pieces.
Loss is felt differently for every one of us and grief is a personal journey. As the months passed, the shock waned, the period of confusion, denial, fear, and anxiety exchanged to reluctant acceptance and depression. Time is ironic. Too little time, too short is life, and with time, all wounds are healed. The scars remain but the all-consuming pain diminishes.
My lifeline out of the darkness was art. I painted’ A dream within a dream’ at a time when I felt hopelessly lost and found myself again, changed but intact at its completion. With my memories as my compass, I painted a life worth documenting. My grandfather lived an honest life, one of which had its share of happiness and love, and too its periods of hardship and suffering. Painted into this piece are symbols of my grandfather’s story; a flock of sheep to tell of time in boyhood, when he loved and cared for a little lamb, a countryside reminiscent of Switzerland and Austria in which he lived for some of his informative years, a European goldfinch to reveal a childhood gift from a grandfather to his granddaughter, and a hermit crab from an October holiday at Bateman’s Bay where a sea shell collected from the shore seemingly grew legs and walked across a lunch table only to be rushed back to the beach to be released. This painting is rich in precious memories that I carry in my heart as well as symbols of life and death and time, of the beginning and of the ending of time. A tiny figure can be made out crossing the bridge in the landscape, whilst the figure of a woman is seen walking in the tall grass looking to figure crossing the bridge. My grandfather has passed on from this existence, crossed the veil if you will. I stand and watch as life continues around me. Perhaps in time we’ll meet again but for now life is to be lived and I intend to live it to its fullest. Time waits for no one, make the most of what you have while you have it.
Adriana Seserko
Born: 1990
Adriana has been painting most of her life. Her attention to the finer detail gives her the ability to create beautifully rendered masterpieces.
Her works often engage the viewer with a moral value, she believes strongly in the preservation of our planet and painting provides her with an instrument in which her views can be expressed to the greater community
