Artist Statement (full)

When the inaccessible becomes the heart’s desire, my eyes turn inward.

 Like lapis heart’s desire is a treasure hard to obtain, but try I must. Take the archetypes. They are invisible forms of energy that constellate within the psyche. They have no physical existence, and I can’t see, touch, or measure them. But as an Archetypal Pattern Analyst, I have studied the patterns of states of mind. And must lock an image within me in color.

Mental states reveal the psyche in color. I paint it fast while hot, if the fire goes out, the image cools and the wings of the spirit fly it away. If not under the psychic influence of an image, I can’t paint. I like Lao Tzu's statement: the heart has no secret that behavior does not reveal.  I must add “that the image does not reveal”.

As a creative thinker, I must rely on my imagination and feelings to recapture an image and release it on the canvas. Some other times, things turn to “thinks” and the fountain bubbles with ideas. I am interested in the reality of mind-objects as well as physical ones. But not objects per se and in themselves, more as the motif for an image in the imagined inner reality. Thus, I paint both abstractly and objectively.

Paul Klee said an artist needs to be a poet and philosopher. I like to add also familiar with Depth psychology.  As far as poetry is concerned, a common poetic thread runs through all my painted images; it comes from the poetry of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam.

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits -- and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

In the process of my artwork, I am very cognizant of the re-molding closer to my heart’s desire with color and form. As I imagine with my mind’s poetic vision, not the verisimilitude of the objective reality.

Essay

Plato: “Shall we lay it down, there are two existing things, seen and unseen.”

In this brief essay, I like to point to some of the mind forms that float in my interior and cause the images that you see. For me, at times, some ideas become so strong that I must express them or burst.  Paul Klee said he paints in order not to cry.

Inner ideas, images, and feelings send me to the canvas, or I want to write and write and write my fingers to the bones. People ask me if I am a painter or a writer. I can’t answer that truthfully.

Here is the truth as I  see it. When I write, I wish I was painting. And when I paint, I get ideas that belong to the numerous unwritten books in my mind. Finally, I thought I hit on a solution. Why not paint what I write and write what I paint? At first sight a clever solution, but then again, I stop praising myself since creating each is mutually exclusive of the other, and the medium differs.

Will it be paper and a parade of ideas or an image on the canvas? So I coast along, unsure. I write, I paint, and end up not so happy, “Why can’t I do both simultaneously? Be drunk with images and sober as to ideas.” It is a dilemma I don’t think I can ever solve, and need to accept the agonizing mental pressures of the demons and Daimons, muse, angel, Duende, Spiritus Mercurius. The list of bugging spirits gets longer every day! Hopefully, I will die happy and not so unfulfilled. Has any creative thinker, artist notwithstanding, died fulfilled?

Hey, the suggestion of taking it easy, sitting back, and enjoying life does not work for me. Please don’t bother prescribing any. Leave me to my misery. I did not choose who I am, nor can rearrange the heightened heart’s desire within. I am still unsure if I am a crazy old man or a troubled young man, or both.

So what am I to do?

I get my animal spirit helpers about me, and we all pray together: “Spirit, would you fall in my container?”

Sometimes I walk around my garden with a bucket at hand, just in case the spirit wants to drop in. So far, only birds have obliged, I reason symbolically birds are spirits too, but poop? Can I rationalize that the poop is gold? The alchemist's motto was to find the prima materia that includes the lapiz in the lowest places. Perhaps, but the spirit is yet to come and fall in. I wash the bucket and keep it up, just in case.

Wait, wait, wait… Just maybe, I should be looking down to earth. Perhaps the spirit is meant to come through the earth.  Duende does. God, that insane duality. The Karma is a limb-to-limb stretch to tear apart between the two poles—for me, the two modes of expression, image, and idea, written or painted.

Coleridge stated we find ourselves either a child of Aristotle or Plato. Aristotle investigated logic and the natural world. Plato dug into aspects of the soul, psyche, mind, and spirit. Coleridge further indicated that if you have Aristotelian tendencies, you don’t want to be Platonic and vice versa.

The truth is, we are descendants of both and love them for their immense contributions.

As an artist, we need all the help we can get, and I bounce between the physical reality of the natural world and the abstract REAL realm of the psyche. Sometimes given to visible other times to Jungian depth and the unseen realm of Plato. That is very evident in the images that I paint or write.

To better see the painted images, let me give you some windows to my soul and psyche. Jung distinguished between those two words. At the risk of tears rolling down, I open some pages of my mind. For, the words soul and love are equivalent for me and moisten my eyes. I asked Self, “Why tears?” - I am not sad. Then I reflected that the intensity of feeling ignites a fire within, and water rushes to put it out. Then with more reflection, I realized it is like crying before a Rothko painting, not because of sadness, but the intensity that the painter felt and unleashed in the image and how it bounces back to the viewer and touches the soul deeply.

In my second half of life, I find the eyes have turned inward. There I get a whiff of the archetypes and rush to paint colorful images of their constellations.

I use the colors in an alchemical sense with some modifications. Our prophet of the psyche, Jung, refused to belong to a set with a fixed system of thought. He maintained his empirical independence to form hypotheses and investigate the human soul and personality, which led to his major contribution, the Theory of Type. He plunged into the personal and collective psyche: Consciousness with capital C, which includes both the conscious and unconscious mind. The tip of the iceberg and the iceberg itself, to use Freud’s analogy of the iceberg.

Freud also spoke of the remnant of the past in the soul. Jung, a Platonic child, expanded the idea into the Theory of Archetype and, in the process, gave credit to Plato for initiating the Form. To the archetypal Form, he added the Primordial Image coming from the realm of Plato as well as our lizard brain and instincts.

Jung dared to speak of rational and allow space for the irrational, whereby we are not masters of our own house.

Here are some of the abstract and objective images I have painted while figuratively intoxicated with the onslaught of the image and idea, under the Jungian influence.
https://naderpaint.com