Drawing/Watercolour.

I’ve been wondering whether to get some Japanese Etchu cards to try, they look lovely with four deckled edges, but they are quite expensive. Instead, I bought some Hahnemuhle watercolour postcards to experiment with drawing and watercolour and I’m not sure I like the paper. I’m also not sure I like the result of my experiment either.

The issue for me is that my drawing style is quite precise, whereas watercolours are a much looser medium. I don’t know if there is a way to get the two to work together. I’ve washed some of the postcards with watercolour and am going to try drawing the trees in with chalk and painting them in with mica in gum Arabic and see how that works. I’ll post the results (even if they don’t work).

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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...

Denkbilder.

Denkbilder or thought-images were a writing form utilised by members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Probably the most famous denkbild being Walter Benjamins “Angel of History” from section IX of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History . It is an image in words, but an image that cannot be rationally explained despite the proliferation of different interpretations. ‘A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows as angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence...

Night Writing: Carl Jung.

For me, the genius of Carl Jung lay in his willingness to allow dreams to influence his thinking. Jung wrote, ‘I knew no reasons for the assumption that the tricks of consciousness can be extended to the natural processes of the unconscious. On the contrary, daily experience taught me what intense resistance the unconscious opposes to the tendencies of the conscious mind.’ [1] In dreams, houses often refer to the psyche of the dreamer. Following one such dream about a dwelling Jung developed his theory of the collective unconscious. Jung interpreted the dream as follows, ‘It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche – that is to say, of my own then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated style, The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became....

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