Indecision, Ambiguity and Duende...and Anselm Kiefer

Art is a demanding mistress. When things are going well, the ideas present themselves and the mediums cooperate to the degree they ever will, your everyday life goes to hell. Because you are so driven and you need to ride the wave while its there. Your house is unkempt, friends and family ignored, daily duties forgotten and forget about sleep. On the other end of the balance, when abandoned by the muse, the body collapses, illness sets in, anxiety stalks you and all you want to do is sleep, hoping for inspiration, messages in dreams, a reason to scrape that first stroke of paint on the taunting canvas. For three months was sick and the hectic pace of the holidays, stepped in and I was deluged by doubts and insecurities. Over the previous three months, I painted more than 30 pieces. The last three months, maybe five. But finally the damn broke last week, my subconcious, the muse, a touch of the numinous stepped in and not only guided my hand, but took over. I started a new series of paintings. So far the working title for the series is "Ambiguity Indecision, and Duende. I'll have to see if that sticks. So far these paintings are oil on wood panel or cradled wood. While my last series focused on textile towns had more to do with my personal history of living in two textile towns, this next series is more psychological and vague. They've painted themselves. The more I tried to control the subject matter, the more the paint worked against me, morphing figures, blocking out sections I thought would work, flowing into figures I had not envisioned. The first was meant to simply be two figure studies. But the first figure, who I call "the lady in red," decided to inhabit just a small portion of the board and soon I ended up with three figures and a dark, slightly depressing interior. The painting is titled The Tarot Reading" and I view it as trying to capture a moment of duende. Duende is a Spanish word used a great deal in poetry. There are many different interpretations for this word and to what it implies. In art it refers to the inspiration, the muses, lacunae, memory. In poetry , especially in the works of Federico Lorca, it elevates to a more evasive concept. Hard to explain, easier to describe, I view it as the space where the numinous hides or resides. Its that dark empty space at the bottom of your pocket, that sliver of nothing between blind slats, the moment before you turn a corner, or that sucked in breath before you start a new paragraph. Its the shadowland between two skyscrapers and that second before you step off a train. In my view, in this variation on the word, rue describes a time, space or place where nothing happens at the same time anything can happen. Its like Schrodinger's cat. Everything is possible at the same time. German artist. Anselm Kiefer, says "Painting is difficult. It's not entertainment." And that is the reality. People might consider it a hobby. Enjoyable. But its not. Its more like a compulsion. An idea has to be released, expressed. And even as a writer of many years, words won't cut it. That's why I call the series, Ambiguous. Because I even felt ambiguous about what I want them to evoke in the viewer. I've always wanted my paintings to be a little disturbing, to make people think and ask questions. If people come to my studio looking for something pretty to go on the wall, they've come to the wrong place. Sure my seascapes might be sort of pretty but even in my landscapes, there is something a little off. Some if them are what I consider dreamscapes deal with issues such as anxiety, abandonment, depression, suicidal ideation. Some people have called my work dark and that's true. I don't believe art is meant to decorate walls. Its meant to make you think. I've been reading "Jung on Art" written by. and Jung constantly speaks to the concept that art us to stir up reactions in the viewer. The artist is taken by a concept and for some reason us driven to paint it out and expose the viewer to the concept, even though it might be difficult and painful for the artist to express himself this way. He/she is compelled. Finally I have stumbled on an artist who explains what Jung has said, what musicians say but we hardly hear artists relate, words nit being their medium. Finally I have been held in awe by both the art and words of a living painter. We hear the names Picasso and Munch, Monet and Modigliani over and over but how many living artists in our time hold such rank, command such respect? Anselm Kiefer is one. A quote of his showed up on my Facebook page so I looked up his art and was blown away. His work is moving and terrifyingly beautiful. It makes you think and makes you sad. He has the pattern ability of Pollock but creates dreamscapes, not quite landscapes,, which might be considered nightmares by some. There is a sense of ruin, or decay, abandonment and something close to apocalyptic. But it doesn't take you over the edge due to an overwhelming sense of longing they instill in the viewer. Very few contemporary artists have held me in such awe: Dave Mckean, Nick Bantok, Gerard Desjardins, Steve Viner, Wendy Farrow, Tim Speaker, Dabney Mahanes.

The Horse in Art, a Jungian View

For 17,300 years, dating back to the cave drawings in Lascaux, the horse has been featured in art. Even up until today, the horse is a common theme having survived so many trends and isms as a subject. Is it the athletic beauty of its physicality , its role as a companion in sport, now that its no longer a neccessary helpmate, or is there something illusive but intrinsic, an essence artists continue to try and capture? I ask all this since throughout my artistic life, the horse has appeared in both my art and dreams. A few years ago, when I first started painting horses, it coincided with a series of dreams and I came to realize that to me the horse symbolized spirit. So it doesn't surprise me that I'm painting a series of horses. This is at a time in my life when I don't feel like I have complete control since I have to have CT scans every three months to see if my cancer has returned. Its hard to plan things such as trips or signing a lease for an art studio since if I have to start chemo I will quickly be too weak to drive or paint. I think this is why I'm returkning to horses as a subject. To me they represent spirit and freedom and are also, in my view, messengers from the subconscious. In Jungian writings, the horse is a complex archetypal figure and an important ally once acknowledged and assimilated. Jung connected it with the primal and intuitive side, especially when hidden in the subconscious. the horse can represent a means to reach into the subconscious world to confront the shadow and access the energy and awareness we can find in any exchange with the unconcsious forces we have relegated to the unconscious realm. Once in the realm of shadow work within our dreams, creative imagination or art, we are often confronted with paradox. When we work with the horse archetype, we are harnessing our energy to deal with the inner conflicts we encounter and the desire to paint horses can be sign we are ready for such a journey. Because, every three months, I have to wonder if my cancer has returned, I find myself trying evaluating my life. As I did, I turned to art which serves to ease the worry but also as a means to communicate internaly. The first horse scene of this series I chose to paint wet on wet on wood. I just started layering on colors without a subject in mind. The orange horse appeared and shortly after the blue figure who I considered a man in a hat. It didn't take long before I recognized the vague figure as Picasso from a documentary I had watched a few days earlier. I decided to leave him vague, as if a ghost was speaking to me from the past, perhaps a symbol my unconscious choose telling me to continue using art as a means to reach the subconscious as he had. the architectural lines of the ancient town were evident in the grain of the wood so i brought them out to remind myself that internal work involves heeding not only archetypal aspects but also history, ancestors and those who have lived before us
James Hillman and Sonu Shamadashani , their noteworthy book on Jung's "Red Book" describe how Jung's message through his own art, was an attention to the dead and how such recognition taught him much about his own internal life. When dreams and images, such as those an artist may repeat in their art, are mirrored to historical theme, Joan Chodorow, notes in her book, "Jung on Active Imagination," we view the larger picture and see what it can mean to our ownn future. The second horse I painted in oils in a wet on wet technique and it is more highly colored and expressionistic than my usual style. It looked to me like a harlequin once he was finished and the harlequin has appeared in my art with a horse before. The harlequin to me is representative of the mercurial figure of Hermes, the trickster or communicator all depending on one,s level of awareness and moral state. The sunrise was inspired by the photograph of another artist, Susannah Melee. and the finished painting seems to be influenced by Picasso's work, although I had not seen many of his paintings of horses.
In another oil painting, this one larger and square, I realized that this final draft looked I finished. I had painted a reddish brown horse, rearing up in a vague sort of mystical setting. I painted this piece without, plan, forethought or any idea about message. I just kept standing back and viewing what appeared. The areas surrounding the border came from mistakes where I removed excess paint when finishing the horse and layered it over the sky and what eventually even became the ground. This is not my usual method at all. I also let the painting sit for days drying. Usually I work wet on wet since I'm in a hurry to complete a project. But on this one I decided to see what would strike me. I did fish for ideas, looking up paintings of horses by famous artists and paintings by artists who were familiar with Jung. Most of the rearing horses I found were either threatened or being threatened. After seeing some of the alchemical paintings by Anne Mccoy, the daughter of Andrew Wyeth, I found one she did with a very beautiful horse. However it was not a testing horse. Then a few days later I saw a painting of a woman offering a tray of food to some people. Something about her pose struck me and I realized I needed a woman reaching out to the horse. At first I thought I would paint the same pose but it ended up with the woman comforting the horse instead. She also came out looking fairly ephemeral do the underlayer if paint and I looked ger that way, looking almost ghost-like. It seems to be second step in my interactions with a horse. In the first painting I did at least five years ago, a female figure is offering a mask to a blacvk horse, which in my Jungian way of thinking is my ego trying to place a persona s mask on myself. In two even earlier paintings, I depict alone up a mountain with a huge skeletal face in the foreground. And in a later painting a horse is barely visible outside a window while a woman inside burns letters. Three two paintings seem to me know to represent my detachment from spirit, while me recent one, still in progress is representing an aspect of myself trying to comfort spirit, which is fairly accurate since I await results to see if my cancer returns and am in the midst of moving out of my art studio. Jung considered the horse a symbol of the mother in addition the the subconscious. And her aspect could symbol the maternal care one needs when confronting the confusion and chaos one encounters with.the shadow. We may have to find our personal internal mother to deal with some of the issued we unravel during any sojurn into the subconscious realm.

Monster High: folk tales and mythos in play

As in the words of Monty Python: "And now for something completely different! "
This may be one of the oddest blogs I write, but I've been thinking about this for a good amount of time, ever since my nine year old granddaughter became fascinated with the new line of Monster High dolls made by Mattel.
For any of you not around young girls, this is a line of Barbie like ball joint dolls, each one unique, each one based on a mythological monster.  They all attend Monster High school and are a spin off of a cartoon.  I wish they had these dolls when I was a child and I can't resist and join in to play with her, Here they are, a bunch of freaks with flaws and odd parents - some with no parents at all,  like Frankie who,  in their mythos is only 15 days old when she starts Monster High. And she wasn't born but was made out of pieces - how's that for a metaphor for the fractured and put back together self?

The reason I think these dolls are great for kids is how they embrace uniqueness, creativity and even oddities and freakishness,  as in  Operetta, The daughter of the Phantom of the Opera, who has no problems with hanging out with  Claudine and Claude, the werewolf siblings, or Laguna the monster from the blue lagoon, who is also a mad scientist. Cleo de Nile and her sister Nefera are mummies with their entire arsenal of Egyptian lore and talismans at any child's disposal, and Draculara and Jolt might be seen dancing or studying homework together despite the fact, Draculara might bite the Jolt on the neck, only to get electrocuted!
 Myths and monsters, as anyone who is familiar with fairy tales and Jung, are the ways our brain embraces those parts of us which frighten -  our shadows,  which are also important aspects of ourselves, and when confronted, may hold us in awe because of their unusual and possible beneficial powers.
I am thrilled to see a line of dolls where children can embrace their strangeness, learn a little mythology, literature and fairy tales in the bargain, and not feel as if they have to be perfect or have the perfect families.  Monster High characters are born from a highly dysfunctional group of families, as many of us are as well.  Yet they function, find friends, embrace life and pull their acts together.  They also don't have quite the seductive aspect of Brats, a line of dolls who appear to be to be the opposite aspect of the Barbie line. In my opinion, the  Bratz dolls are too sensual, Snookies reincarnated in plastic, and not the best role models.
While there are some wonderful dolls of more human character and design such as Moxie and Liv dolls, and I think these are great role models for girls, I personally enjoy the Monster High creativity and diversity - the illusive Abbey Snow Man, Ghoulia and Spectra (a ghost), the werecat twins and Jackson who is related to Jekyll and Hyde.  
 You can tell that the writers of the cartoons and doll designers are having a blast coming up with ideas, digging into their own cultural memories of monsters and the things that frighten us - the creatures who live in our unconscious minds as well as in the universal unconscious depths.  Bring them into the light and let them play  -  for play is one of the ways we discover our split off selves. 

Yes, the girl's skirts are a bit too short for a grandma's taste, but otherwise I even love the clothes,  everything from party dresses to kilted skirts, to tomboy sporting clothes for the girls and
I'd love to meet some of the designers and see if they are from the generation whose parents and grandparents first embraced Jung, as well as monster stories, folk and fairy tales and gothic literature. What a goldmine of teachable lessons in restraint, self awareness, social ostracism, control of personal powers and emotions as well as empowerment.
I'm always excited when I see contemporary or even pop culture embrace the dark sides of us all, for without first confronting  and then embracing the shadow, we cannot come to comprehend the numinous or the divine in others or ourselves. 

via regia, the royal road into the unconscious

For those who begin the journey of the Via Regia, the royal road into the unconscious, whether it be through dream work, psychotherapy or even art and writing, they quickly realize how frequently they undergo a variety of experiences, from impatience for the work to prove fruitful to awe when it does in ways no one could imagine, from excitement to fear, from growing awareness to losing oneself in the dark.
 Working with both realities - the dream and the real world in tandem, can be difficult, but the see-saw must be occupied, even if not fully maintained at an equal level. The dangers are there, as anyone who has worked in the field of psychology of psychiatry can see, when the journey into the unconscious world is  undertaken by a traveler unarmed with enough reality tools to stay sane.  Reality can fade into the background in a sort of gray haze, or even worse, the lack of staying in touch with it,m lead one so deep into the coils of the unconscious, they get lost, as in the cases of psychosis and schizophrenia.
I'm undergoing such a journey right now through dream work. It's a journey I've done before, and although I've attempted other journeys which prove fruitful in revealing aspects of the unconscious, such as poetry, writing, art and active imagination, dream work tends to be the more powerful and therefore the more dangerous.  I tend to want to sleep a lot, spend time writing out and analysing my dreams.  I become a hermit and as one friend used to say, "distracted."
This time, I'm finding that my dreams are even warning me about detaching too much from reality.  Luckily, I work with individuals who have traumatic brain injuries and therefore need me fully present and very grounded in the real world at all times during my work.  So this helps a great deal, providing me the talisman to stay real and work on my dreams more on the weekends. 
However, I also believe in physical talismans.  They've been used by people who delve into the unconscious for ages, right up into the way the modern mind thinks, such as Dom Cobb who spins a top in the movie, Inception as he enters other people's dreams. It's the only way he can tell whether he's in reality or the dream world.
I've always been one to carry something in my pocket. When I was about 10 or 11yrears old,  I swiped a square inch piece of sparkling mosaic tile from the construction site of a Greek church right behind my grandmother's house.  I carried that tile in my pocket for years and in my mind it had magical properties, even though I often felt guilty for taking it.  Over the years, I've carried stones (when I hiked a lot), pieces of metal I found at the side of a road, (when I made art assemblages in my studio in a rough part of the city) and now  pieces of sea glass form my favorite childhood home area.
The sea glass represents the soul to me.  I like sea glass because it is brittle like the various fragments of ourselves when they've broken away from the whole.  The brown ones from ale and beer bottles symbolize the prima materia - the course aspect of our soul before we have worked with it.  The everyday soul, the beer bottle of common man and earthy life.
The green ones, from coke bottles have a little more vitality. Like Venus, the color represents healing and love, energy and renewal.
The red is dedicated to our passion, our obsessions and loves, desires and the drive to seek love and experience in the world.
And the more rare blue, represents the airy state of the intellect, when we study and educate ourselves to make our lives broader and richer.
Purple  is one of the rarest. This one enters into the spiritual realm, the role of transformation and awareness-seeking in our lives. And how odd,  the gold and yellows representing the Solar force and the whites or clear, representing the Luna force,  you rarely  find washed up by the sea onto the shore, even though clear is the most the most prevalent on land.
All of these together represent the rainbow, the peacock colors of the hermaphrodite, the joining of all and opposites into one whole.  I love seeing my pieces of sea glass displayed all together in a jar on my mantelpiece, representing man's constant magical, sacred and ultimately divine search for the self in all it's varied and colorful aspects.
Like most people, I also wear certain gemstones in rings or pendants for this purpose.  

 But I like how the sea glass starts off man made, like we are as individuals when we construct our persona to protect the vulnerability of our true self.  However once the glass is tossed or lost in the ocean, it undergoes a series of natural refining processes. It breaks apart, fragments, as we do into archetypes in the subconscious, and as the glass is tossed about in the depths of the ocean  (the subconscious) the pieces become smooth-edged and frosted by the abrasive action of sea salt, stones and sand. They are transformed from sharp pieces of brittle glass which can hurt us, into stones which are beautiful and soothing to the touch. When they're tossed up on shore, they're ready to be exposed to the conscious mind.
Plus sea glass is rare and hard to find and takes a contemplative attitude as we bend our heads and walk along the shore line, sometimes for hours, waiting for that one flash of colored light in the corner of our eye and there below us is a piece of sea glass easily identifiable among the browns, grays and blacks of the seaside stones and sand.
So now, in addition to my two rings, I carry two pieces of sea glass, since we often forget about the rings on our fingers and their meaning.  But when I tuck my hand into a pocket and find the pieces resting there, I am reminded of its meaning and purpose, which keeps me aware and awake.
So for now, I'll carry a piece of brown sea glass to stay in touch with the earth, and a piece of green sea glass for love and healing and renewal.  I've recently replaced the red garnet ring I wear, feeling that I'm pretty much in touch with my passion for things in my life and have replaced the amethyst ring, which stands for spiritual growth and transformation and which is even more potent for me as a February Pisces, since it was a gift of my birthstone - a reminder of my true complete selves, not just my limited persona.

Individuation after mid life

The Individuation Process - one of the most important aspects of Jung's work, up to which all his techniques, methods, agonies and mistakes, insights and writing lead, is said to be the journey in the second half of life.  While the first half of life is a  Hero's Journey, the fool stepping out into outer world to develop an ego strong enough to withstand the descent into the unconscious, the second half of life is an entirely different kind of journey, sustained and only effective in the inner world as a search for the true self and a spiritual nature, which is not respected or supported in the outer world, but is necessary for teaching the younger generations and the healing both of the self and of those one encounters, perhaps even the world despite the limitations of society.
Without the Hero's journey, individuation is  a precarious path, one which can lead to wholeness and authenticity or to destruction as in the case of the Neitsczhes, Morrisons, and Cobains.

I've been on this spiral journey for years now, often stepping off to embrace life on a more simplistic level,  but the nudge comes, often from a depression of a unexplainable lethargy.  I stop listening to music, avoid writing, stop cataloging my dreams. Often it is some synchronistic event which kicks me "awake" and then I can't turn back.  That event this time was the lecture on Carl Jung on his Red Book. It has set me off on a whirlwind journey this time, back to the realms of Ishtar and Hecate, Orpheus and  Hermes, and a return again to Lily, Jacob, and writing more about Alex and Mavis of my published novel Shaman Circus, and an unfinished second novel Shaman in Exile. 
With the sight of so many people at the lecture on Jung and all those who joined the webinar  on the movie, A Dangerous Method, at the Asheville Jung Center, as well as carried on a highly animated conversation on the website's blog, I felt like I'd find what I'd hoped to find more than 20 years ago, people in the area interested in Jung. I even started looking for a Jungian therapist in the Greenville area, but unfortunately cannot find one, or even a discussion group - not unusual in the type of city Greenville is and the fact that most of those interested in Jung are introverts and not likely to shout of their interest to the outside world. So it looks like I'll have to revert to my usual methods which I came by out of desperation but ha e since discovered are techniques Jungian analysts suggest to their patients - painting, writing, poetry, recording and examining dreams,active imagination (which I've done often since being a shy and introspective child), even dance.
Introverts tend to find the path of individuation quicker than extroverts, who feel comfortable in and who rely on the outside world. And while my childhood was lonely and painful as an extreme introvert, I am grateful now. Turning inward is natural to me and to accomplish the lifelong task of individuation - the wholeness of the self, as opposed to the fractured person we often become thanks to the pulls of various aspects of society, we must be able to go inward - into the "pit" (as I call it), the dark and frightening places, the basements and caves for that is where we meet the sides we have repressed - but along with their frightening actions and aspect, they offer gifts, gifts of pieces of ourselves who we've cast off, judging them unfit for social consumption - which often is suggest by a society threatened by change.
  I hoped it would happen and it did - re-reading lots of Jung, alongside novels (currently Babel Tower) by A.S, Byatt, with Jungian undertones sets of dreams.
I've been really fortunate that in the midst of a couple of very stressful weeks at work in finding the best ways to care for my clients (I still find it out that I'm now a civil servant who can't talk about their job in any detail) I'm surprised that lately I've stopped dreaming about work and am dreaming some of those big dreams, Jung wrote of.  They're easily recognizable to anyone who has kept dream journals off and on for more than 30 years. My dreams often have the same elements, such as water, sometimes calm and welcoming like a pond, which often means good things to me or at other times wild and rushing oceans taking over whatever house I'm in during the dream. The night before last it was the basement of a cottage without a cottage on top -  that ones easy to figure out.  There were these huge bashing waves, like tsunamis hurling massive amounts of huge tree trunks as a if a log jam had just been broken up and they were curling to crash into the place and bury it when I got out the back door.