Wednesday, March 25, 2009

striking archetype


...........As phenomenological models go, synchronicity appears more useful than our old ideas about cause and effect. The "cause & effect" model presupposes the existence of a linear time-line which so far as I can tell, does not exist. Sometimes the effect appears before the cause. The appearance shifts in time in accord with the viewpoint.
Some people have told me they had seen the image of Alfred Hitchcock shooting billiards, before I drew the image for the poster that appears in the last week's article (17 March).
I don't know where the idea came from, so if anyone finds such an image, please forward it.
Usually I can trace exactly where I got an idea and how it developed. Not this time- immediately having abandoned the well-worn Hitchcock sillhouette idea, the next thing I knew I was sketching the billiards table image.
I may have seen an image of Alfred Hitchcock playing pool and looking directly at the camera, forgotten it, and the subconscious memory percolated into my mind's eye- if so, it surely must have been a published image, which means others saw it as well- maybe.
On the other hand, maybe I struck an archetype- an image that lives in all our minds, but had no obvious external source. If that's the case, it represents real paydirt for an artist. It means I'm doing the right thing- the image struck a deep chord.
Classical Greek art of the highest order is like that: for instance, a statue of a ram is not just a ram, it is "Ram" - Ram-ness manifest, a terrestrial iteration of the celestial archetype. Call me a neoPlatonist, if you will.

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