"Visitor at the Door" Print

At seventy-seven years old, Chicago-native Dik Müller is just now embarking on a fine arts career. He received his formal art training at the American Academy of Art in Chicago in the late 1950s, after which he opted for a career in marketing – a logical choice given this was the heyday of the post-war consumer boom. For the next five decades he designed and produced promotional media for Chicago-area, national, and international companies. To counter the pressures associated with producing client-driven commercial art, and to satisfy a deep urge for personal expression, he frequently enrolled in classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Now, with the commercial art chapter of his life closed, Dik is putting his full energy into art making, especially painting and mixed-media works. He is influenced by Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, but rather than picture personal dreamscapes or primordial landscapes, he explores the imagery associated with alternative states of consciousness, most notably those that “appear” in the various stages of sleep. Specifically, he seeks to evoke the universally experienced, color-rich, amorphous, and shape-shifting forms and image-fragments that appear as we begin to doze off, or just before we wake. After fifty years of making images, Dik is energized by his new commitment to making art.