The Animals in my Head

The Animals in my Head

Acrylic on Canvas, 36″ x 40″ 2018

“Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we’re frightened, the hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We are history! Everything we’ve ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are.”  (Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky)

The Saboteur is a painting from series I am working on called ‘The Animals in my Head”. I have been recording my dreams over recent years and I found that animals often make an appearance. The animal dreams stand out from the others, they are the ones that leave a lasting impression upon waking.  In some instances I have dreamt about animals that I have only ever seen in books or on TV. It made me curious as to where this imagery could be coming from. I started to research dream imagery and quickly found Jung’s work on dreams and archetypal symbols. 

Jung believes that we have in part inherited this symbolic language through our evolution. Archaic elements can occur in a dream, “mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind” (Carl G. Jung, P57, Man and His Symbols 1964).

It is these archaic remnants of imagery from my uncivilized monkey mind that is the focus of this Series.