Ocean Dreams by SOAL Studio: Nothing Here Is Frightening

Ocean Dreams by SOAL Studio is a hand drawn underwater scene, crowded from one edge of the sheet to the other, and every creature in it that would normally mean danger has been drawn as harmless.

There are at least five sets of bared teeth in this picture. Not one of them is doing anything.

Ocean Dreams is a hand drawn art print by SOAL Studio in collaboration with Alan Pedersen, made in a style influenced by anime and Japanese illustration. It comes in two colour editions, Great Reef and South Sea, and three sizes, printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g. Every print carries the distinctive mark of SOAL Studio.

A sea full of teeth, and no danger in it

Every animal here is drawn in the same handwriting as the water around it, and that is what takes the threat out of them. The teeth are neat rows of small triangles. The eyes are round open dots, the same dot on a long jawed predator as on a snail. One creature near the lower left corner has its mouth wide open with nothing at all in front of it.

The whale in the middle of the sheet is smiling. Its mouth is a single closed line that lifts at the front, and above it sits an eye the size of a bubble. It takes more space than anything else in the picture and it is the calmest thing in it.

Look at what has actually been gathered on this sheet. Two whales, a jellyfish with its bell up and its tentacles hanging, an octopus, eels, fish, a beaked head, snails coiled like ammonites. In a photograph these would be several different oceans at several different depths. Here they are all exactly the same distance from you, drawn at the same weight of line, and not one of them is nearer than any other.

One creature in the whole picture has its eyes closed

The octopus in the lower right corner is the only thing in Ocean Dreams that is asleep. Its two eyes are drawn as long closed lids with a short fringe along the lower edge, and its arms are curled up beside its head with the suckers marked as small circles. Every other eye in the drawing is open.

The print is called Ocean Dreams, and there is exactly one sleeper in it.

You do not have to read the whole sheet as the octopus's dream, but the drawing makes the offer. Nothing in it follows the rules of an actual sea. There is no surface and no seabed, no light arriving from any direction, no near and no far. Everything is present at once, which is how things turn up when you are asleep and not how they turn up when you are swimming.

It also accounts for the teeth. In a dream the toothed thing does not bite. It is simply there, at the same distance as everything else, wearing the same round eye as the snail beside it.

Imaginary Ocean by Alantherock is the other invented sea in the NOKUKO catalogue, and it was drawn by the same hand that worked on this one. There the ocean stands in for the imagination itself, vast and without a shore. Here the sea is simply the room the dream is happening in. Both were built line by line rather than observed, which is why neither of them has a horizon.

Great Reef and South Sea: which colour is the water

The two editions hold the same drawing, and what changes between them is which of the two colours you read as the sea. None of the animals is coloured in, so whatever the ground happens to be, they are made of it. Change the ground and every creature in the picture changes with it, in a single move.

Great Reef puts you under the water. South Sea puts the water on paper. In Great Reef the ground is a near black violet and the line is cyan, so the drawing glows the way things do at depth with a lamp on them. In South Sea the ground is a pale lime and the line is red, which reads as ink on a page, an illustration handed to you rather than a place you are standing in. The two were first shown together in 2023, described then as dark navy purple with light blue, and a yellow green with red tones. The difference turns out to be larger than a palette.

There is one more thing both editions share and it is easy to miss. Every line in this print is drawn twice. Behind each stroke sits a second stroke in a colour that appears nowhere else on the sheet, plum behind the cyan in Great Reef and a soft sea green behind the red in South Sea, offset by roughly the width of the line itself. It is a deliberate misregistration, the kind a printing press makes by accident, and it gives a completely still drawing a faint tremble. Which is more or less what happens to anything you look at through water.

Ocean Dreams is offered in three sizes, 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm, in both editions, on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g. The SOAL Studio mark sits in the lower right corner inside a small filled block, which is the only solid shape anywhere in the picture. A tree is planted for every print sold.

The octopus stays asleep. Whatever else is moving in this picture, and a great deal of it is, the one creature at the bottom of the sheet keeps its eyes shut and lets the rest of the sea carry on without it.

That is a generous thing for a picture to do. It puts every alarming animal it can find in front of you, and then asks you to look at them the way the sleeper does, which is to say with no need to decide what happens next.

About Ocean Dreams

What paper is Ocean Dreams printed on?
It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g, the heavier art paper NOKUKO uses for its art prints, chosen for how it holds flat colour and fine line. The original is a hand drawn illustration made by Alan Pedersen for SOAL Studio, worked in a style influenced by anime and Japanese art with a Scandinavian inflection. The frame shown in the product images is for illustration and is not included.

What sizes does Ocean Dreams come in?
Three sizes, 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm. Both editions are offered in all three. The composition is identical in each, so a larger size gives you more of the small detail rather than a different arrangement of it.

What is the difference between the Great Reef and South Sea editions?
They carry the same drawing in inverted colour. Great Reef is a cyan line on a near black violet ground. South Sea is a red line on a pale lime ground. None of the creatures is coloured in, so the ground is what shows through them, and changing edition changes the whole sheet at once rather than one part of it.

Is Ocean Dreams a limited edition, and does it come with a certificate?
No to both. Ocean Dreams is an open edition art print and is not one of the eight limited editions NOKUKO holds. No certificate of authenticity is issued, because certificates accompany original paintings rather than prints. What every copy carries instead is the distinctive mark of SOAL Studio, printed as part of the sheet. A tree is planted for every print sold.

Written by NOKUKO.