Giclee Print Gallery

This series of paintings are a self exploration to uncover the personal myth running through life experiences. They represent an acceptance of the notion that there are deep seated stories that run our lives. We are not necessarily conscious of them until they leave us ragged, complaining and mystified perhaps by the injustices that are "just not our fault".

Having turned away from therapy as a source of finding a core experience of self, I turned and reached inwards to express archetypal images, stories and symbols in an attempt to gain some understanding of what I was dealing with.

Any way, for better or worse, I thought I could run with that and see what happened. I intended to release the "unconscious" story that ran my life, and get a better one! ... get the energy back! After all I experienced strange periods where deep feelings took me over without explanation.

The journey was always surprising and the paintings always changed into something I hadn't intended at the outset. I was continually challenged to let go of endeavours to impose meaning prematurely and place more trust in my unconscious processes.

So I just kept painting using old tales to focus my mind. I struggled because things unconscious are just that and maybe they needed to be that way or being unconscious how can you tell if they exist.

I got lost in images without words, a kind of madness that made me vulnerable, needing the one thing that my 'story' denied me, a rational map of reality. I wriggled in my actual life, digging for things I resisted facing.

detail of 'Yellow Brick Road'

The funny thing was that perfectly formed images appeared out of the paint while I had been doing something else. My attitude was a cross between 'stream of consciousness' and Abstract Expressionism that I loved. For instance in the "Yellow brick road" painting, a gnarled, rude, little man appeared in the bottom left hand corner and I didn't form him consciously.

That painting is centred on Rapunzel in the tower trapped by the wicked witch (mother/daughter conflict I assumed) using an image of someone I knew was going through such a drama. At the same time, I was comtemplating a theme of discovering oneself and purpose (The wizard of Oz). It looked like an underdeveloped part of psyche, a little joker man behind a screen of illusion and there he appeared! I wasn't worried about mixing metaphors, my intent was to give myself licence to express what was coming, in any way I could and worry about presentation after.

I was aware of the notion that one could disown and project onto others parts of the psyche one found too threatening to accept about oneself.

Having just listened to Ken Wilber on 'the actual self, the false self, and the real self' while also pondering upon the dilemma of not trusting the thoughts of a false self plus notions of shadow projections, I realised I liked the distinction he made between the structure developmental stage having a finite false and actual self and a temporary state experience of the infinite real self.

He explains how one can have a temporary state experience of the infinite real self but when one comes out of it, land back in the false self without realising there is an under developed actual self at that developmental stage.

Anyhow I can't hope to do him justice and of course leave that to him and you, if he interests you; only to say it makes a lot of sense to me and an understanding I lacked and probably would have helped my painting experiences.

So looking at them now and other paintings in my studio, with the concept of actual, real and false selves, there it is. The perspective giving me so much pain, my story I tell myself in the privacy of my head, as plain as the nose on my face... now what?

We all need to leave the past behind, not have it colouring and operating in our minds on false assumptions. We need to be present in our relationships and not let the past cause over reactivity and I no longer want to risk focusing on me as a problem.

There, I am done, self analysis run rampant, I want to move on....

Let it be said however 'that whatever you do a lot of, you get better at' for good or bad and following creative impulses and finding ways of expressing them leaves me with a sense of joy of my own mind and helped build a relationship to my creative self without so much anxiety.