Every year, I get questions from numerous students writing upon my work. I always think this is the last time I am doing this…as I attempt to create resources and information on my website that would cover everything anyone would ever want to know about my work. Yet, I always answer. I always learn so much by answering. I love a good question. Question from Gianluca in Surrey: What makes you include mythology and philosophy in your work? Carrie: From my very first drawing at age two, I drew in metaphor. It was raining outside and I was stuck inside. I drew with pen on paper, “a snail in the rain.” I told this to my mother who titled it and like the great archivist she is…it went into a book, with a date and my age. I was two and ½. Victor Hugo said: From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the same time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought. Carrie: As much as I knew I was an artist from my awakening, I knew my mind worked in pictures that were a form of story telling. To this day, I will be solving a very big life problem and I will see a vision – a flash- that is really a type of pictorial code for the situation. I will then paint this image, and see a density to the images used that goes to the language of the storyteller, to poetry, to myth…the more I use symbols, the more their significance takes on form through layered meaning. The layers start in history and then are written over, a form of palimpsest, as my own personal mythology is developed and uses personal experience in order to speak through the past. For this to occur, it is usually a form of coincidence and/or synchronicity for the meaning and symbol or image to arrive together. I have read a good many books, but I do not generally go the book and then paint the painting as this would be stiff. I wait for the images to find me. In this way, I am telling myself a message as much as I am relating my message to the viewer. I guess this is a little like walking through the woods and seeing a deer, rather than trying to find a deer through walking through the woods. The imagery in my work arrives from dreams, visions, and sometimes through playing with collage…where I cut up lots of images from books, calendars, and posters; and much like someone might see images in tea leaves, I arrange these images until something sparks and ignites a composition. From the Power of Myth, page 5. (This a dialog between two men Bill Moyer and Joseph Campbell.) Moyer: I came to understand from reading your books, The Masks of God or the Hero with a Thousand Faces, for example – that what human being have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are. Campbell: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves. Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you being to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myth, of those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts- but if you read the others ones, you begin to get the message Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Carrie: There is a quote by Jung that I can not put my finger on just now, but he says that archetypes are “horizontal moving animals that travel through our consciousness.” This may be metaphor but the longer I am on earth, I see examples of people being worked on by archetypes without their knowledge of each other, as in, when two people have the same idea at the same time. Archetypes are those leit motifs, those big reoccurring ideas/symbols that myths are made out of. I believe that archetypes have an energy or a power that is bigger than metaphor. In prior times, they would have called this magic. Author -Alan Moore describes this as: There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman… From the Mystical Qabalah, page 90, unit 26: Dr. Jung has a great deal to say concerning the myth making faculty of the human mind, and the occultist (spiritual person) knows it to be true. He knows also however, that it’s implications are much farther reaching than psychology has yet suspected. The mind of poet or mystic, dwelling upon the great use of the imagination, penetrated far more deeply into their secret causes and springs of being than has the scientist; it is not for nothing that the racial imagination, working thus, has come to associate certain animals with certain gods; a brief examination of the examples cited serves to show the basis of the association. The doves of Venus show her gentler aspect, and the cat-bests her sinister beauty. Carrie: In the process of answering your question, I have attempted to tie, the world of symbols and myth to that of art and magic. In the last era, I would have been made fun of for this statement. However, I hope you will see through the quote below, that religion, science, and magic are but systems that man has invented to explain their existence. From The Illustrated Golden Bough, Sir James George Fraser Without dipping so far into the future, we may illustrate the course which though has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven of three different threads – the black thread of magic, the red thread of religion, and the white thread of science, if under science we may include those simple truths, drawn from observation of nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Carrie: I will end with the discussion with this quote: Government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies. Frank Herbert I talk about the invisible worlds and meanings that the artist makes real, yet this can be very peculiar and whimsical. However, once you start to see the power behind belief is that which forms our very government, we begin to understand the plasticity of the world and how real imagination and belief is when it is applied. As an artist I am attempting to reinvigorate the historic use of images, symbols, and myths while simultaneously giving my life to them. I have aspirations of contributing to the enrichment of human consciousness through my creations (please look at my completed works in a year or two as this is what I am painting now). I believe art can change the world and cure a sick world which must heal itself. Close your eyes. Imagine the world with out music, painting, and dance. These are what fights to keep our culture and our spirit alive during strife, war, famine, and disease. When I use myth, I am using the powerful language of the human experience to wake myself, up as well as, the viewer into it’s past, it’s present, and elucidate the future. I am making dreams and ideas real. I am showing a map of how to take the invisible and birth is into reality. Some are just practice but one day, I may make something that builds an entirely new room in possibility.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 03:13:44 +0000
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