I would paint the wind...
...............................................<<<<<<..... ..Arthur Dove
An artist friend, Barbara Tudor, told me last year that the drawings I had done after my heart attack reminded her of the work of Arthur Dove, the first American abstract painter.
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I looked at his work on the Web, and came across his painting of the Red Sun. To me there was an eerie similarity of the Red Sun and a drawing I done and named The Spiral Maze. I read further about him -- He thrived most in the out-of-doors, worked on a farm, lived on a houseboat. He sounded as if he would feel right at home in Alaska. To my astonishment, he made this painting four years before he had a disabling heart attack, in 1939.
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A year after I saw this painting, I was visiting the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. I saw one of his works, and proceeded to tell my brother how one of Dove's paintings was somehow similar to a drawing I had done. I walked up to the next level, and suddenly there was the Red Sun. The Real Thing. I was stunned.
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I sat down and cried, and cried on and off for the rest of the day. These were not all unhappy tears.
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Dreams and art (at its best) both are representations of the Unconscious. This experience for me was a confirmation of Jung’s theory of archetypes, that there are universal, underlying and connecting patterns within all of us.
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Web Links
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The Phillips Collection: The Red Sun
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Wikipedia:Arthur Dove
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Wikipedia: Archetypes
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The Spiral Maze
