The Birth of the Jungle

The Hero’s Journey is my artistic, psycho-spiritual journey. Just like the Hero in the visual fable in the drawing, “Hero’s Journey into the Bone Forest” and in the oil paintings, “Hero’s Journey I and II”, I too was afraid to enter the “Bone Forest”, the unknown. The place deep inside myself, in my unconscious where my imagination originated was a scary place. This is where my shadows, my insecurities, my lack of trust in my abilities and in the existence of spirits dwelled. Just like the plants in pots I felt restricted by my fear from expanding into new territory and clung to the security of drawing and painting from reality.

Although I did enjoy the variety of forms, shapes and lines that make up exotic plants and the shadows behind them, nevertheless, I wanted to unearth and express my own images, which I strongly sensed were waiting to be revealed.

In 1989 after I returned from an extraordinary tour of a Costa Rican Rainforest, I came back full of images of giant trees and plants of myriad variety, colour, shape and form, twisting and turning through endless space; many-hued exotic birds flitting through the branches. I started with one image, in the oil painting, “Jungle Fantasy I”, and kept reworking this image in an attempt to try to capture how I felt. An example of this exploration is the oil pastel drawing, Jungle Fantasy II”

Finally my jungle image evolved from an experiment during the following year. One day , I left my painting, “Jungle Fantasies I ” standing on the back of a table behind some pots with plants - I decided to play with illusions. I planned to combine the flower pots and the painting in one drawing. I liked the idea of combining an illusion of reality - the painting, with drawing reality- the pots; and in this way creating another illusion of reality; the final drawing. As I worked on the drawing, all of a sudden the pots seemed superfluous and my drawing became a dense, convoluted jungle. I called it, “Crazy Rhythm”, because it reminded me of drawings I saw in an exhibition of the jazz age in 1920s America. This drawing finally expressed the feelings I felt in Costa Rica as I had stood, awe-struck by the jungle’s unfathomable depth and mystery.

During this period, I started embracing an ancient spiritual belief and practice called, Shamanism, a way into inner depth. Realistic images of the parrots in the previous jungle painting, “Jungle Fantasy I”, became spiritual male and female allies, with personally empowering headdresses in “Crazy Rhythm”. My imagination was beginning to take over and I became excited by the possibilities. I recreated my black and white jungle image on canvas and the “jungle” came alive.

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