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Intractable Arc of the Sun
A grand arc of solar fire strikes in the desert leaving a Man of Flames and gold serpents plunging fangs into my body and an enchanting Woman of Light. All coalesce into a molten tantric couple. Then a huge tree trunk, worthy as the keel of a mighty sailing ship appears across my field of vision. These dream elements inspired a work that mounts in pyramid forms to create a fanciful ecosystem of insects, crystals, snakes, birds and trees as a Golden Garden Spider hovers in regal attire among metal pendula, a metronome and denizens of this realm of ever-present origins.
Aphrodite’s Green Moon
This whirlwind celebration of romantic love, ardent desire and colorful natural forms reflects mighty Aphrodite’s furtive and disruptive way of playing a man’s anima, here a fanciful inner woman with red lips, a honeycomb hat, wings, thong and fire off against the most indecisive workaday Hollywood film editor imaginable. Her indecision is dramatized by two Thai swordsmen as a starved stone Buddha must perforce shelter the artist’s inner child and waning flame of hope as an intractable Dionysian goat looks perpetually on.
Yogini’s Garden
Mindful of the perilous threshold between this world and another an Indian villager offers baksheesh to a formidable guardian spirit for safe passage into a tantric garden where stars glisten around a Christian tomb. A pregnant detail of the famous Arnolfini wedding portrait by van Eyck mirrored on our yogini’s belly is articulate. Asian and indigenous traditions brim with sacred sexual images while the intimacy of Magdalen and the Lord she knew even beyond death has only gradually come to be fully appreciated in Christian circles.
Pink Earth of Eden
Imagery of the primal earth, a ship, dinosaurs, Eve, a well, skulls, a breast, a clay vessel and the galaxy itself converge with contrasting modes of maternity. Osiris dispenses a hieratic blessing from above. Three indigenous angels approach a da Vinci Great Mother with marsupials cradled in their dark arms in homage as a golden Christ and gold coins grow on trees. Freud eyes a cigar above as Jung contemplates a mandala as an ancient reptile.
Virgin Underground
This work seeks to sooth the historical tension between the Grace of the Virgin Mary and that of the Three Graces of pagan tradition who, as bees, nymphs or beautiful women accompany Hermes-Mercury on his soul-making errands. They all harken back to the ubiquitous Triple Goddess of antiquity and to her phallic son Eros, but also to Black Madonna tradition, Isis and Nut, Egyptian mother of the night sky. As vultures (sacred to Isis) strip a carcass above to banish easy sentimentality, Mary Magdalen tosses pearls into the void to guide a Mexican maiden (or any naive soul) into a darkening void that gradually becomes Cosmos, where Ave Maria, the original Eve of flesh and her pagan sisters merge in the superordinate person of Sophia.
Symphonie Fantastique
An unredeemed aesthetic type in art school, I was immersed in Bosch, Breughel, Symbolists Moreau, Delville and Toroop, the dark visionary Alfred Kubin and the flamboyant Ernst Fuchs in Vienna. Baudelaire, Huysmans and Rimbaud impacted me as I also counted Mahler and Berlioz among my musical heroes oft repeated the latter’s own program notes for Symphony Fantastique in a parody of myself: “A young man of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination takes a massive dose of opium in a fit of amorous despair and dreams that he is at witches sabbath.” Little did I know in 1973 how precisely this program had become my own!
Hermes in the Amazon
Created in Zurich while exploring comparative religion and ethnology, this beautifully integrated work responds to hero Mircea Eliade’s classic book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy and John Layard’s classic field study of New Hebrides ritual traditions, Stone Men of Malekula. They opened my eyes to elemental levels of experience where animal spirits bring gems, pigs must be sacrificed, men walk on fire, where phallus, snake, spine and tree are analogous, Macumba reigns and all are one in a seamless pulsing ecosphere.
The Rape of Persephone
Millions of Greek-speaking women and men of antiquity resonated with the myth of Persephone, Mother Demeter and Hades for nearly1500 years, sharing in their sacred Mysteries of descent and return at Eleusis just west of Athens. Here the power of myth returns in a secular key with the original characters. Persephone winged in shades and thong reappears below provocatively bound. Hades encroaches unseen, appearing only as a devious skull below. Dark Hecate guides Persephone with an eerie palm of green flame as Demeter wanders somewhere in her wintry grief. The fateful moment before Persephone is abducted prevails even as a child struggles to be born from flames far below.
I Can See Everything
This thematic free-for-all derives from a German cartoon (right) where an action hero cries "My Eyes, by all the gods! I can see everything! Everything!” The visionary bravado, a hallmark of psychic inflation, is witnessed by two dubious Henry Fuseli demons to emphasize that the shadow side of a personality grows darker, more unwieldy and a greater problem for others in proportion to the “enlightenment” espoused. A golden-winged black child who can read hieroglyphs, Sleeping Beauty napping on a multi-eyed salamander, archetypal brothers posed between rose and swastika, religious parody and a pinch of alchemical fantasy round out this colorful tondo.
Air Machine
In Hermann Hesse’s Demian a youth man paints a falcon emerging from an egg, which pleased me as a lifelong birdwatcher. But I still marvel that identical imagery could later emerge from my own psyche at a crisis point in art school as a hyperventilating monstrosity whose chest expanded upward to be fiercely cut to fleshy ribbons by its own sharp wingtips. Only later would I encounter the classic alchemical motif the avis hermeticum where an eagle flies upwards to devours its own wings and tumbles again to earth. The dream’s intense impact called Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” to mind, but this with quite a contrasting emotional charge!
Nighthawk of the Annunciation
My kinship with the Nighthawk began with seeing them wheel around a church steeple in Sioux Falls after fleeing a dreary wedding party at thirteen. Recurring dreams of these emissaries find me deep at night, high in the treetops of our property where they sit on its limbs flittering their wings or glide across the starry sky. Far below curious townspeople shine lights into the trees attempting see what’s there. At times I am a nighthawk. No one ever sees me. The song “Harp Tree Lament” and the dream of a brass sextant merged with cubist guitar also inspired this portrayal of an inner world where prenatal blessing and life’s fiery green sap are one and Sophia women, Hermes, Kali, shamans, naked black men and a single Mexican trombonist inhabit the same chthonic realm.
Staking My Heart
Conceived in the fantasy of a heretic sufficiently mad to pray, sing or laugh while being burned at the stake, my equations of magma, fire, blood, wood and transient flesh figure strongly as they weave around a delicate heart alive with worms and flowers only to rise as seven jeweled torches. My image of the Dark Goddess (in fact that of Hypnos god of sleep from the cover of a Swiss magazine, Du) was saved for twenty-three years to fulfil this role. It appears at the south pole of Jupiter. The stake and flowering ribcage, a naked Dionysian banshee, Kali in red and my own dreamy white anima girl are surrounded by monads that burst into organic forms: bird beaks, claws, fishtails, lizards, then skeletons of a fierce bear, chimpanzees and an elephant bird as the artist’s alter ego. Alexander von Humboldt looks on as Iowa City’s famous Black Angel spreads her wings in gracious acknowledgement.
Sunshine from Pure Desire
The central vignette of a bearded man perplexed to realize that he’s joined at the hip to Diana of Ephesus strikes an androgynous and polytheistic chord amplified by the celestial pearls falling through a fiery sky to seed a provocative sunshine of love. A skeleton harpist joins in the ancient strains as a girl dips her toes in a spring, an eccentric alchemist walks his pet beetle, a red devil revels and a black hooded monk exults as twin Thai dancers curtsy politely nearby.
Graham Girl’s Macumba
Taking liberty with one of John Graham’s "Two Sisters" (1944) she stands bewitched by the piercing ray of an unseen black man’s eye in a work exemplary of the anima-animus syzygy which C.G. Jung describes. Both are partial personalities but also transpersonal figures. Both are nested in the psychosoma and experienced in somatic memory, dreams, active imagination, and noncognitive states generally. Anthropoid eyes appear below between the legs of a shimmering galactic spider as signs of verdant life abound.
Cataclysm
A fascination with the similarities between Salvador Dali’s erotic drawings of Millet’s gleaners, the simple forms of Edvard Munch, the kneeling Virgin, saints and patrons of Northern altars and my own drawing and watercolors of angels, volcanoes and waves culminate with this simple composition of a graceful maternal figure paid homage by two cloaked birds against a luminous aquatint sky. Here I grasped the psychological significance of my imagery, it a token of my brother and my devotion to our deeply religious mother, a paraplegic for thirty-seven years. Its title is a wordplay on “catechism,” definitely a part of my Dutch Protestant origins.
Pileated Puer with First Responder and Fallen Hawk
Themes from the Persian tale “The Conference of the Birds” about the long journey to God, of Orpheus playing his lyre and singing so sweetly that birds and animals gather around, the delightful Bird Catcher song in Mozart’s Magic Flute and my whimsical fantasy of Carl Jung as Orpheus wearing a pileus hat on his way to school at age eleven converge in this ecological lament. All touch my lifelong love of birds and all Nature but are painfully endangered by polar melt, ignorance and the toxic spew of our madly monetized global consumer culture.
Hilltop
My title is shorthand for Mount Cithaeron, sacred to Dionysus, to whose peaks The Bacchae retreated for their revels in Euripides’ drama of the same name. I recall first reading W.F. Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult for a Roman Art paper on Pompeii’s Villa of Mysteries and warm-heartedly so upon recalling my naïve remark to a housemate: “You know, there must be people out there somewhere who know all about the myths and rituals of ancient peoples. That must be fascinating for them.” Projection has heuristic value! Carl Kerenyi, Jung’s collaborator and my Zurich analyst, C.A. Meier’s dear friend, sees Dionysus as the Archetype of Indestructible Life.
Grackle
As if assembled from flesh and bones scattered by the wings of my formidable “Air Machine” (image #9) or left atop Mount Cithaeron by mad revelers, this work bears a blackbird’s name chosen simply for its onomatopoetic “crackle.” Swayed like an odd crustacean’s portrait its shaft bespeaks the priapic urge, the core of Dionysus religion and the same motive force that inspired my Sexuality and the Religious Imagination (2020).
The Chariot of Fate – Sublimely
In 1973 this powerful etching marked a sea change in my vision as I grasped the necessity of augmenting an aesthetic worldview with a depth psychological one. As fate would have it, a state proof of this etching sent to my brother Derrick was answered with a copy of Carl Gustav Jung’s seminal autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Five years later after completing an MFA and working as a Psychiatric Assistant in a Minneapolis hospital I entered analytic training at the C.G. Jung Institute Zurich.
The Rebirth
Artists have long yearned to capture visions of Beauty just as Coleridge imagines a dream of going to heaven and plucking a strange beautiful flower: “And what if / When you awoke / You had that flower in your hand / Ah, what then?” Such was the dream that inspired this intaglio. Walking on warm desert sand I see a red stone I then recognize as a sculpted hand of Shiva with seven fingers. Then I stroll down to a clear pool and wade in but begin to sink and stretch out on my back to wait. Women soon come to draw water before I return to where the sculpted hand lay. I see instead a delicate glass table elegantly appointed with flowers and a lovely meal of fruit, bread and wine. A chair is pulled back for me. Seated I look forward and behold an enchanting fair-skinned woman smiling graciously at me. Her serene penetrating gaze is like precious few I have ever seen.
Mercurius in Malakula
This perilous inscape reflects the spell cast on me by Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula, his study of pig sacrifice and male initiation in the New Hebrides. Its imagery of clay ceremonial grounds instantly transported me back to dropping a big rock in a deep cistern at three, then to watching men butcher pigs as a teen long before an analytic dream’s “just so” necessity found me clubbing a four-eyed boar to death in the back yard of my family home. Four is always related to the Self, a universal. Fire born Mercurius rises as an alchemical androgyne as sad Elephant Man lifts his arms toward Venus. Mercurius is the Lumen naturae, the Light of Nature or again, the anima media naturae, the Soul of Nature somewhere between matter and spirit.
Reminiscence of a Summer Evening
This somber nocturn still fills me with a retrospective compassion for the imaginative but sorely disheartened young artist who made it. Once on a late night drive near Iowa City a lone dead cottonwood appeared in the moonlight, its bark fallen, its trunk circled in vines, its pale branches stretched eerily up against the sky. Here its wrists are bound, capturing the tension between death’s claw and thwarted transcendental yearnings. But look to the center where luminous leaves float like fireflies. Do you see a face? The Gospel of Thomas warns us: “When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much will you have to bear!”
The Bartok Enthusiast
Quirky, pensive, opening with a trudging piano rhythm to counter an abrupt cello entry that wanders off in wintry strains, Bela Bartok’s “Rhapsody 1 for Cello and Piano” was an immediate favorite in art school, conjuring up images of a tipsy grasshopper on uncertain terrain. Big Bird (as a girlfriend’s baby sister called me) sits in as a capable musician equipped with arms and fingers for this whimsical performance. He just had to use a bow with as many feathers as possible, a silly blandishment akin to Liberace’s famous candelabra!
Tetragrammaton
Our title is a Greek word for the God of Israel commonly translated as Yahweh though more strictly referenced as Hashem, “the Name.” This is composed of four letters in Hebrew, yohd, he, waw and he. The four-winged angelic being featured is reminiscent of Ernst Fuchs’ images. It hovers over the Jerusalem Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, a modest god-imago whose slender body is the sheath of a concealed sword. Word and image thus fall together in an “angelology of words,” an imaginal activity James Hillman recommends seemingly drawing on his Jewish side, an ancestry where Hebrew letters are traditionally regarded as living entities.
Beyond the Fish Traps: Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer
My pilgrimage to Magdalen sites in the South of France in 1997 coincided with the sudden death of my dearest friend and mentor, Donald F. Sandner. In a grievous farewell I found myself chanting Om Sri Kali Ma beyond labyrinthine wood fish traps along this fabled shore. With black waves rising ominously but retracing my steps, I turned to behold the comet Kohoutek beyond the bell towers of the local basilica, home of Black Madonna Kali Sara. Framed thus between solitary beach and a passing comet, this work brims with association to Don and to the disciple who Jesus loved the most.
All Things Great and Humboldt
This playful cabinet of natural and alchemical curiosities harkens back to an age of battling academic faculties, elite scientific fraternities, passionate explorers and museum curators, all captivated by the mysteries of morphogenesis. Originally titled “All Things Darwinian and Sacred” in order to confound religionists and rationalists alike, this work celebrates the anima telluris, that specific power of Earth to produce mineral crystals, microbes, cells and living bodies in such remarkable diversity and abundance independent of all human ratiocinations.
Garden Scene with Eve and Earth Angel
Created as a cover for my Sexuality and the Religious Imagination (2008) with a charming Eve barrowed from Cranach this work is surmounted by a fiery ibis, originally the Egyptian Thoth and forebear of the avis hermeticum of alchemy who morphs perpetually twixt bird and serpent. He carries a starry microcosm with Sun and Moon. The Syzygy theme is echoed by a Bosch couple in utero and a child born of a matronly dinosaur behind the black Earth Angel lower left. Above, Lord Shiva sits in lotus with his trident as devotees opposite bless the god’s genitals with red paste. A shaman prods a ‘Jung-lizard’ with a magic phallus rear. Jung was so terrified by his childhood dream of a cyclopic phallus that he spoke of it only fifty years later!
