Nightmares? At the very least, dreams you hope you wake up from really soon. This is the gorgeous / haunting work of Norwegian painter Lars Elling, and this is a description of his work, from Galleri Brandstrup, the gallery that represents him in Oslo:

Elling is a storyteller. His layers of imagery evoke memories of childhood, with the possible disturbance and trauma written between the lines. Family is the repetitive theme in Elling’s works; familiar moments infiltrated by surprising or unpleasant elements. The formalistic aspect of Lars Elling’s paintings is characterized by the erased and the broken. The pure visual expression has a meaningful function, where story and poetry are strong fundamentals. The paintings can be seen as a burst of memory, a description of a moment, where the almost experienced or almost seen is presented in a dreamlike and poetic expression, which can be compared to the poetic expressions in the works of Francis Bacon. Also like Bacon, Elling’s works also portray a description of the logic of feelings, and illustrate a beginning, a middle section, and an end, however not in that order.

{via Create Magazine’s Instagram}