Essay

To inspire is to animate, to induce purpose into life. From my life through imagination and dreams, I have been inspired to make images. Images concerning my experience as a woman - daughter, sister, wife, mother - in a time and place where the old system is rapidly disintegrating.

Our species seems compelled to create, to decorate, to illustrate. We have left a global trail of images and artifacts from prehistory to the present day. These things fascinate me because I feel that deep urge to react artistically to life too. Perhaps artists share an obsessive-compulsive creative re-ordering condition. I say that only half-jokingly, but whatever it is, it is uniquely human, and it is where I feel alive.

So I have always painted, but it was only around midlife that I began to paint my inner world. Until then, I had focused on outer subjects, the natural world, flora, and fauna. Then Soul came a-calling, big time. Dreams so vivid and compelling I had to take them seriously.

So I have always painted, but it was only around midlife that I began to paint my inner world.

We were living in the USA at the time. I remember sitting under an oak tree in a New Jersey park reading a book by Joseph Campbell while my young sons played in a soccer camp. I had never before (nor since) heard voices, but at that moment, I heard three words - loud and clear - “Read Carl Jung!” It was very disconcerting, as I was sitting alone. But I followed that ethereal advice, and my life and art dramatically changed. Struggle, difficulty, and uncertainty remain, but filtering life through a Jungian mythopoetic approach has made it feel worthwhile and somehow invites connection to the bigger spiritual human picture.

Whether dreamed or creatively imagined, the vital question for me is what information are metaphors carrying? What do I need to learn here? There is such illumination to be wrestled from these bespoke, personalized mini-movies.

Whether dreamed or creatively imagined, the vital question for me is what information are metaphors carrying? There is such illumination to be wrestled from these bespoke, personalized mini-movies.

Because I enjoy it so deeply, painting is the instrument through which I gradually accept the often painful or humbling veiled realizations that dream insights can offer. I am often surprised and somewhat disappointed at the finished results, but I am compelled to keep doing it because it is the process I love and learn from. The slick, drip, bleed, smell, and splatter of paint, the bite or softness of brush, the wrestling with design. Even the reassuring routine clean-up of the mess afterward, all is an engaging, sensual interaction with the world. 

In my early twenties, I lived on the tiny Isle of Iona in Scotland, working with the Iona Abbey Community. It is a stunningly beautiful place of pilgrimage and history and the place where the magnificently illustrated Book of Kells was created. This artwork is for me the epitome of human creative spiritual inspiration expressed with devotion through craft. Inspired by spirit, people were compelled to create, and they produced something material that still enchants and invites wonder today. I think our dreams invite us to play with them in this same devotional way. We all have a sacred manuscript, song, poem, or creation potentially within. A true soul reaction; a “Red Book” reaction to an aspect of our life. I revisit Iona still, as nowhere else on earth gives me quite the same combination of wild natural beauty and ancient human myth and magic. It opens me to the “Dazzling Darkness,” the unknown source of our dream and imaginal content. The outer place reminds me to take the inner place seriously.

Spiritually I’ve moved from my childhood monotheism, through atheism of youth, to my current acceptance of all gods, past, and present. I find myself dreaming my own story forward, trying to marry matter back into spirit and spirit into matter. Trying to see my version of the Spirit of our Time. 

My paintings are like postcards from my inner travels. They remind me where I have been and the questions I am asking myself.

My paintings are like postcards from my inner travels. They remind me where I have been and the questions I am asking myself.

I would like to hope that my art – my postcards from Metaphoria - might entertain and perhaps inspire others to engage in creative conversation - their own way – with their individual inner life, to interact with and honor their inner muse.
www.sallycarlaw.com