In this painting by Suchitra Mattai, we see a cartoonishly depicted, sleeping artist whose dreams are dominated by a larger than life page from Owen Jones’s 19th century book The Grammar of Ornament. This British, colonial era design manual appropriated design principles native to Islamic, Southern European, African and Asian cultures, and advocated for the reduction of natural forms into idealized images and patterns. As the artist of the present is haunted by a colonial legacy of the past, an organic tree—a hopeful symbol of the artist returning to the source, and overcoming reduction to get closer to what’s real—sprouts through the top of the page.