Lee Hadwin Never Dreamed of Being an Artist. To His Surprise, He Became One in His Sleep

During his waking hours,
artist Lee Hadwin has no real creative
talent—and he’d be the first one to admit this. At night, though,
when he’s deep asleep, he makes elaborate drawings and
paintings. And he doesn’t remember any of
it.  

It started, Hadwin explains,
when he was four years old. A frequent sleepwalker, he would get up
from bed and roam the house. Eventually, he started pulling crayons
and pencils out of his school bag and scribbling on his bedroom
walls. After he was done, he’d go back to sleep.

His parents were confused. “He’s
just a child sleepwalking,” the doctor told them. “He’ll grow out
of it.”

But he didn’t. In fact, he got
better at his craft. Over the course of one night when he was 15,
Hadwin made three small pencil drawings of Marilyn Monroe. They
weren’t perfect, but they looked like drawings done by someone who’d likely had
some training, was probably older than 15, and was certainly awake
at the time.

“I suppose for me, that’s when
it all changed,” Hadwin tells artnet News. “Suddenly it was
like, ‘Whoa, I may have something here.’” 

Since then, Hadwin, who was born
in Australia and now lives in London, has made hundreds of nighttime works. Sometimes
they’re figurative sketches; other times they’re more abstract. The
schedule is similarly unpredictable. Usually, he’ll make a piece a
couple of nights a week, though occasionally he’ll be limited to
one every couple of months. In his early 20s, he went years without
making anything.

Hadwin has learned to prepare
for the occasions when inspiration finds him by sleeping with art
materials nearby. He prefers what comes from moments of spontaneity
and his subject matter doesn’t have a clear provenance. (His
drawings of Marilyn Monroe did not arrive after he, say, fell
asleep watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) Rather, they
come to him the way dreams to all of us—some inexplicable mix of
lived experience and imagination. 

A spiritual man, Hadwin is also
not ruling out the possibility of other forces being at play. He
recalls one instance when, the night prior to a meeting with a
group of sleep experts, he drew the number
23. “One of the first
questions they asked was, ‘What’s the last drawing you made?’”
Hadwin recalls. “I said, this is what I drew last night’ and I
handed the picture to the doctor. Then I saw that she had a
necklace with the number 23 on it. ‘It’s my lucky number,’ she
said.’”

“I had never wanted to be an
artist,” Hadwin says. “I was never in to art, in to school. My
highest grade was a D.” He says he’s only started calling himself an
artist in the past four years, when he quit his day jobs and
started making a living solely off of his art. (His works generally
sell for between $1,500 and $10,000.)

Today his work is included in a
current exhibition of
sleep-related art in
Albury, Australia. He’s also working on a book about his art, life,
and inspirations titled The Awakening, due out next
year. 

He knows that some more professionally trained artists and
curators might not take him seriously, but says, “I never take it personally. At the end of the
day, art is subjective. It doesn’t matter if you’ve studied art for
one year or 40—if someone likes a piece, that’s all that
matters.”

For those who might question the
truth of Hadwin’s story, it’s worth noting that he has been filmed
making art in his sleep numerous times and has undergone several
sleep studies. Each time the researchers have chalked the habit up
to a form of sleepwalking. Hadwin points out that there are plenty
of people around the world who do curious things while asleep—eat
or write poetry, for example.

He has an idea for a reality
show where a group of these people are filmed living together in a
house, Big Brother-style. 

“With a load of sleepwalkers, I
think it would be a great experiment!” he says,
sincerely.

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Surprise, He Became One in His Sleep appeared first on artnet
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