Drawing/Watercolour.

Since posting about interpreting dreams, I have not been able to remember a single dream which is typical. I’ve been working on my watercolour/drawings with mixed results. I still have not come up with anything that I am completely happy with. I want to submit some work for a fundraising exhibition for Leeds Poetry Festival. The work has to be postcard sized (A6) and I am not used to working on such a small format.

Most of my work has a ghostly quality but this is lost in most of the watercolour postcards I have done so far. I am getting increasingly frustrated. I am very tempted to go back to drawing but I have a stubborn streak. I will keep at it like a dog with a bone until I get a result that I like. I am wondering if pastels or charcoal might work better with the watercolour so I might try this next. Below are some of the results so far.

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The Unconscious, the Collective Unconscious and Symbols.

Jung observed that the idea of the unconscious presented by Carus and von Hartman disappeared without a trace, it then re-emerged in medical psychology. [1] He noted that at first, the unconscious denoted forgotten or repressed contents of the psyche. [2] Jung suggested that it was the study of dreams that allowed psychologists to study the unconscious aspects of conscious events, ‘As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.’ [3] Jung then noted that, ‘It is on such evidence that psychologists assume the existence of an unconscious psyche – though many scientists and philosophers deny its existence. They argue naively that such an assumption implies the existence of two “subjects,” or (to put it in a common phrase) two personalities within the same individual. But that is exactly what it does imply – quite correctly.’ [4] Sigmund Freud, despite being aware of the m...

Metallic Watercolours.

I don’t really understand my newfound fascination with watercolours. I have realised that there are a lot of interesting watercolour paints out there such as the Daniel Smith PrimaTek and A. Gallo watercolours which I have been hankering after. One of the points Julia Cameron makes in The Artists Way is that artists often deny themselves luxuries – things that artists like. We will spend money on other things but things that make the inner artist happy are deemed too frivolous. I decided that I will set up a fund that I will put a bit of money in every so often. I will then use this to buy the materials I really want, such as a set of A. Gallo watercolours or a nice pad of Arches or Saunders Waterford paper. This week I had a little tree production line going of trees in metallic watercolour on black watercolour postcards. They have the ghostly quality I mentioned before but this doesn’t come across in photographs. I remain frustrated by the whole tree carry on. I get the q...

The Ship of Life.

‘This sea of sleep, deep in the foundations of human nature, has its high tide at night: every slumber indicates only that it washes a shore from which it retreats in waking hours. What remains are the dreams; however marvellously they are formed, they are no more than the lifeless remains from the womb of the depths. The living remains in him and secure in him: the ship of waking life, and the fish as the silent booty in the nets of artists.’ Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 399. Sometimes I have premonitions, dreams that alert me that something is about to happen. Often, I would prefer not to know. The rest of the time I try to divine the future through tarot cards or runes. This is a pointless exercise. I am on a journey, like everyone else, on our ships of life. Most of us are far from our desti...

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