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Gestural Painting, Subconsciousness and Archetypes

Before 2020: Reduction and a New Beginning

Until 2020, much of my work remained figurative. I kept trying to reduce what I depicted, until that process seemed to lead to a dead end. Abstract painting offered a new beginning. The portrait below, from around 1989, belongs to an earlier stage of this search.

Sparse black portrait of a man with a high forehead, drawn with broken contours on white paper
Portrait painting, c. 1989

Since 2020: Subconscious Associations

I did not have to begin again with the tools of painting. What changed was my attention to subconscious associations and archetypal images, an interest I connect with C. G. Jung’s writing on archetypes and the collective unconscious. For me, these ideas offer a way of thinking about images that seem to carry more than their visible forms.

Two Ways of Thinking About Painting

The works shown here grew out of this reflection. Their structure owes much to Chinese ways of thinking about yin and yang, opposites and the interaction of forms. At the same time, I am exploring impulses and primal fears. I want to see what happens when these concerns meet within a painting.

Green and black angular brush forms with broad washes, fine crossing lines and white openings
Black and ochre masses with broad rust-red vertical strokes, separated by white paper
Recent gestural paintings with an organic approach

Viewers have told me that these paintings are beautiful and strongly attractive, but also frightening, brutal or threatening. Someone even felt that they revealed tremendous anger in me. Such responses interest me, though I would not take them as a diagnosis. The same brushwork can invite very different associations.

Two upright black forms with brown and muted red brush textures on a white ground
Two curved black forms facing one another, with ochre strokes and a broad white space between them
Black calligraphic forms with deep red patches and red dots surrounding irregular white spaces
Three works seen together: differing forms and rhythms invite comparison.

Perhaps this means I am approaching what I want: to stir something in the viewer beyond what is depicted. Or perhaps my thoughts about it are beside the point, and the work has done enough if someone simply finds it beautiful.

Beast: a broad black form above turquoise and grey washes, with upright dark strokes at the right
Beast – Archetypes in gestural painting

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12 responses to “Gestural Painting, Subconsciousness and Archetypes”

  1. rose kern avatar
    rose kern

    Dear Friedrich, this time its both, beautiful and frightening,especially the last one, you showed today.And thanks again for your Chinese deepening of the subjects.

    Reply
    1. zettl.fr avatar
      zettl.fr

      Thank you Rose! I also posted them in to response to our discussion on “Wut” in my artwork. Feeling frightened is a great reaction on the last one

      Reply
  2. Martha Kennedy avatar
    Martha Kennedy

    I love the last painting. Often when I look at your work I find I’m more “moved” or ??? by color than the images made by your brush. Of course they are together so there is no real separation. They are dynamic and evocative.

    Jung’s ideas have always seemed a little hysterical to me. The Chinese notion of constant movement between being and not being has always made more sense. It’s observable (I’m a very pragmatic person…) in nature where I spend a lot of my time (and time spent thinking). But I’ve never studied western psychology. It’s bad enough to have one (ha ha).

    Last year I painted the momentary balance between being/not being as I had seen it. It was an enormous gift during a few minutes last March. I was given a large canvas years ago but couldn’t imagine painting on it. After thinking about it for a while, pondering what I’d seen in those moments, I knew it belonged on the large canvas. (1.3 m x 1 m) Even painting it was an experience in exactly that moment of balance.

    https://marthakennedy.blog/2020/11/21/finished-the-big-painting/

    Reply
  3. zettl.fr avatar
    zettl.fr

    Thank you Martha! Yes, I am trying to immerse myself more in the world of colors: colors play a very subordinate role in the area of Chinese painting with which I am grappling. I want to give colors a more promonent rrole while trying to keep my palette small.

    I read C. G. Jung very early and he was / is important to me because he was the first European to delve deeper into Zen Buddhism. But I know too little about prychoanalytics to be able to say anything worth mentioning. I pick out the little that I understand better from the “subconsciousness” and that is the area of dreams, myths, fairy tales – and we’re back to the archetypes.

    Congratulations on your painting, it’s very beautiful. In a way it reminded me of a painting by Gerhard Richter, even if his intention was a different one.
    https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/jpg279/lebenmitpop_pos3a_gross-formatkey-jpg-default.jpg

    Reply
  4. Martha Kennedy avatar
    Martha Kennedy

    I see the similarities between Richter’s and my painting — the main difference I see is that the stag seems to acknowledge the presence of the painter/seer. I’ve found myself in recent years attempting to wander through nature without bothering it; a departure, I guess, from earlier years when I wanted some kind of acknowledgment from it, even if I wasn’t aware of it. I like the panel of breakage that seems to have been cut out of the painting and pasted over the stag. Intriguing.

    You’ve sent me a link from the Goethe Institute. Psychologically/philosophically –I foundered around for a long long long time then accidentally read Goethe, Italian Journey. That’s a long story, but the upshot was that here was a person who struggled with what I struggled with; the inability to distinguish between the internal and external world. And there he was, consciously or unconsciously looking for a rope out of the trap of his own psyche. He found it in the direct apprehension of natural phenomenon and the behavior of people in Italy. I was already wandering there. His companionship (it was) and tutelage possibly saved my life and certainly saved my artistic life. The line between the internal and external world became a creative relationship rather than an amorphous and dangerous trough. I don’t know how to explain it. But…

    “The surest method for me to secure my future happiness was on the basis of my productive talent.” from one of the voluminous autobiography.

    That crane painting is the Sandhill Crane and, I think, hope, it communicates the love I feel for them and all they gave me last year.

    Reply
  5. zettl.fr avatar
    zettl.fr

    Goethe was of course a central figure in my school days. As is so often the case, the teachers managed to spoil one’s joy. But the older I get, the more often I discover new things about Goethe. Thank you for your reference to the “Italian Journey” and this sentence:

    “….the inability to distinguish between the internal and external world….. He found it (the rope out of the trap of his on psyche) in the direct apprehension of natural phenomenon.

    Well, that’s exactly what Chinese painting does. Through the meticulous study of nature (the inside and the outside) the student himself becomes the object of his studies and through the mastery of brush he becomes the creator. (yin::yang)

    Reply
  6. Martha Kennedy avatar
    Martha Kennedy

    I guess you may have gotten Goethe the way we get Shakespeare, a lot of reverent, joyless, mind-numbing instruction. But then I saw The Tempest 🙂

    I appreciate what you’ve written here. “Through the meticulous study of nature (the inside and the outside) the student himself becomes the object of his studies and through the mastery of brush he becomes the creator. (yin::yang)” That’s beautiful and apt.

    Reply
    1. zettl.fr avatar
      zettl.fr

      Exactly, Shakespeare….You know that it was impossible for me to listen to Schubert (now longtime favourite composer) after I had music in school. How much must these teachers hate them that they try everything to keep the kids away 🙂

      Reply
      1. Martha Kennedy avatar
        Martha Kennedy

        Yes. Hate them or don’t understand them. In graduate school I had a seminar on Hamlet and we NEVER read or saw the play. Just read one critic after another. It was ghastly.

  7. frederick anderson avatar
    frederick anderson

    Do we then have to go to Jung before viewing the painting? I don’t feel fear emanating from these – in the boldness of the strokes I sense strong definition, anger too, perhaps, but I also have a sense of maternity, of protective behavior, defensiveness, perhaps. This is what defines my love for art, I’m sure I see things the artist never intended! Spectacular paintings, though.

    Reply
    1. zettl.fr avatar
      zettl.fr

      Thank you Frederick! Your words mean a lot to me as they come from a colleague whose thoughts and opinions I value very much. No, you don’t have to have read Jung first. I found it worth mentioning because for many years now I have been dealing more with western classical philosophy and psychoanalysis again. As you rightly say, you see something different in the works than other viewers. And that’s a good thing. We can only ever see what is fundamentally anchored in our thinking. However, I find it helpful for the viewer to get more information about the painter’s thinking, which of course is reflected in his work.

      Reply
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