"When you have a thought or a talent that is your overriding thought and you can't do anything else in your life but that—it's a little bit desperate." --Julia Zagar

In Philadelphia there are several buildings covered from ground to roof with mosaic murals. They are the work of Isaiah Zagar, who has been at this for decades. In a Dream is a film by his son Jeremiah about Isaiah and his family and the place this art has had in their lives. As his wife Julia tells us, this work is something of an obsession with Isaiah. He gets up every morning to go to work on the mosaics. He spends about $50,000 a year for the supplies.

The first half of the film gives us an introduction to Isaiah and Julia, and to his art. He has always been an artist, first planning to be a painter, then discovering his gift for mosaic. As he puts it, "The way I work, I put one thing next to another." Perhaps it is a way of putting order into his life. He began this work after being hospitalized for a suicide attempt.

There is a darkness that always is in the background of Isaiah's life, even if his art is vibrant. Not just his suicide attempt, but the egocentricity that seems to drive him. Most of his art includes self-portraits and portraits of his wife and sons. It is his life that he is trying to piece together. He says, "All my art work is a journal of my life." Later he also tells us, "That's what I'm trying for: to be alive in the work, to try to impregnate the work with my life." It is almost as though if he could get everything right in his art, the rest of his life would also fall into place.

But everything in his life does not fall into place. Whether it is a son with a broken marriage who ends up in rehab, or Isaiah and Julia's own marital problems, things are much messier than the world of Isaiah's murals. At times, Isaiah seems too absorbed in his work (or himself) to fully take part in the life of his family. That leads to serious trouble. The consequences of that oblivion are very hard for him to handle.

It is a challenge for a filmmaker (even a son) to get into the head of an artist. While Isaiah expresses much of his life through his art, he is often less able to express himself verbally. I expect much of the reason he comes across as well as he does on film is that it is his son behind the camera. That familiarity gives him the comfort to be a bit more open about his work and himself.

The creative process often has a numinous quality to it. Just as we look at God as creator of the cosmos, often men and women have gifts that allow them to shape the things of the earth in ways to make something new. Isaiah feels this in his work. "I'm not searching for answers," he tells us, "so much as for encounter. I'm searching for the mysterium tremendum in everything—EVERYTHING!"

In a Dream is itself in search of something that can't quite be touched—the connection between artist and art: the way the pain of life can lead to works of beauty, and the way that even in the midst of beauty, pain often overwhelms.