'Sunshine'

I have a thing for retro graphics. This is a beauty: Women's Weekly, December 13, 1948. I think it is a collage of photographs with illustrations in the inset. This is pre-digital/Photoshop so the photo-collage would have been difficult to pull off. Illustrators from this era had incredible skills. Respect.

Image: Digitally enhanced by author, from 'Australia Remember When' Facebook page, 29 February, 2020.

Video Fuckheads

I think I have posted the pen drawing previously - this is the final colour version. Inspired by one of my pet hates.

Image: Author, original concept, pen drawing - digitally coloured.

A Girl Like Me

This is autobiographical of course. This is me as a girl - constantly frustrated at missing out on what the boys were doing because they had so much more fun. I was a Brownie and my brother was a Boy Scout. He got to go canoeing while I walked on tin cans with string attached to them and learned to sew. 

I figured ways around it though - like borrowing my brother's shorts and changing out of the pretty dress my mother had chosen for me once I got to school. Then I was free to hang upside down on the monkey bars and kick the footy around with the boys on the oval at lunchtime. 

I feel sorry for her, ending up with a girl like me. Luckily my mother was a bit of a feminist deep down so eventually she stopped trying to make me behave like a girl.

Image: Author. Digital collage with drawing.

A Little Subversion

Image: Author. Digital collage.

The 'Hanged Woman' in the Year of the Rat

It often happens that when I am off on one train of thought a serendipitously timed intervention occurs. For some reason I was thinking about Trump, trying to put the whole debacle into some archetypal context my brain might better comprehend. The image of the Hanged Man synchronistically flashed into my mind's eye. I'm used to this - it's the way I work, the way I think, the way I make sense of my life. I call it 'image first'. I wrote about it in my thesis as I used it to 'follow' the inherent wisdom of images from my own psyche and their projection onto the outside world. The method is random and chaotic - I forget it probably makes absolutely no sense to anyone else but I try to demonstrate how it works by using real life examples. 

Anyway - I used to read Tarot irregularly for myself so I know a bit about the Hanged Man. Too lazy to find my books I Googled:

'The Hanged Man Tarot card indicates that you are in a situation that you are not happy with. You may be feeling like you are stuck in a rut or trapped in a situation or frame of mind that is not making you happy but you have the power to release yourself. This may involve walking away from the situation or simply changing your perspective on it. The Hanged Man may also signify that you may be facing a dilemma and are unsure of what path to take...... You need to step outside yourself and look at your situation from a different angle. Give yourself time to just relax, stop trying to control things and just let them be, the correct course of action will become clear to you in time.

In a spiritual context, The Hanged Man tells you to be mindful of your attitude to yourself. If you have been engaging negative thinking you need to stop this as it is may affect your outcome as well as how you feel about your life.... If you release old beliefs or negative thoughts that don’t work for you anymore, you will find that whole new spiritual worlds will open up to you and free you up to connect to your higher consciousness'.

Of course I know this stuff, it's a pity I regularly forget to apply it! 

I drew the image above when I was going through my Minotaur phase - dealing with the dark masculine in my own psyche which of course I had, and still do, project onto the world. When I went looking for images for this post I found it again and realised it was perfect - it's the same feeling of frustration and restriction, being 'trapped'. I realised that thinking about Trump, my current predicament and this image were very much related. The common thread is the patriarchy - that brand of toxic masculinity that is responsible for the decisions that are destroying the planet and our species. Just the other day I wanted to scream: why is the patriarchy STILL winning? Patriarchal ideology and its associated behaviours - paternalism, control, domination, disempowerment, aggression - is present and destructive on so many levels, in many different environments and scenarios. And it has indirect links to my present predicament, which I will not be able to expand on here.

So what's happening in my 'real' world?

As I predicted, the Year of the Rat, of which I am one, has started with a bang. Because of events completely out of my control I've temporarily lost my job. Asbestos was found in the education centre ceiling cavity at my place of work. The tests came back and our boss informed us all, just as we had closed the school for the lunch break. I wasn't surprised at the result and of course understood the implications immediately. We all went home. Usually, because I'm a casual, they only have to give me 2 hours notice and my work is cancelled. Several of my colleague lecturers are in the same boat. We were all quite stunned.

My usual boss (who is great) is on leave and his replacement is awesome. She will do everything humanely possible to get things up and running again, and keep me on some kind of reduced wage until things get going again. She has told me several times she doesn't want to lose me. Turning 60 this year, I don't think I'll be overwhelmed with job offers. 

So here I am - the Hanged Woman - suspended, but taking note of the 'simply changing your perspective' advice from Tarot Google. The message is always personal - if you are blaming the patriarchy then you are simply projecting that style of thinking outwards from your own psyche. 'Matriarchal' thinking can be fierce, but it can also be flexible, go around things, apply less force and be smarter with energy, effort and time. 

Ok, so maybe I can use the time and enrol in the Certificate IV in Mental Health study I was going to start in semester 2. Maybe this is an opportunity. Maybe this is a sign that I am going in the right direction. I rang the college and left a message. Or maybe it's just an opportunity for some 'time out' - I am pretty exhausted after doing summer school and sliding straight into the start of the semester. Anyway, I went outside and counted frogs in my pond, and I went surfing on both of the days I should have been at work (I'm an honest employee, so I'll make up my work hours when it's onshore).

Struggling just gets you more entangled.

The Tarot Guide

https://www.thetarotguide.com/the-hanged-man
Image: Author. Pen on paper.

Munted Bear

I've rebranded 'Kranky Bear' to 'Munted Bear'. There is a kid's book called 'Cranky Bear' and although he's not a patch on my bear, I didn't want to run into any copyright issues.

Munted Bear now has his own Instagram account and will be posting there irregularly. I'm doing some research on whether it's worth linking a Shopify account to it so I can sell stuff. Dunno. Never really been interested in that aspect of being an artist. I'd prefer to keep it as a digital webcomic but that doesn't generate income.

Image: 'Munted Bear' by author. Original concept and drawing.

1984

Image: Author. Digital collage.

It's Too Hot to Wear Pants!

Image: Author. Original concept, hand drawn, digitally coloured.

Humanity Must Turn Left

Image: Author. Manipulated digital collage.

Taking the Piss

Most of my creative work these days is focused on creating 'memes'. Sometimes this takes the form of a digital collage of mine or other peoples' photos and varying amounts of drawing to make individual components fit together seamlessly with my words finally added. Sometimes it is work I've made from scratch - from the original idea, drawing in biro, scanning, digitising, colouring, adding text. 

It took me a while to find a word to describe what I was doing. If you look at both definitions above, the word 'meme' does the job, though personally I am more focused on the humorous side of things, albeit in a very critical, paradoxical context. 

When my students ask me what I do I explain the process but when it comes to explaining my intention, the easiest way to do that is to use the Australian phrase: taking the piss.

In the current fraught economic, political and climate change dominated world the process of creating memes has been my sanctuary and saviour. It allows me to vent my frustration in a creative way whilst not really upsetting anyone, well only a bit maybe. I can say things in memes I wouldn't say in words alone. Memes are short and punchy, they can deliver an effective 'critical' blow while at the same time keeping people amused. 'Entertaining' people is possibly the only way to get them to listen to what you are saying.

Although the digital method is relatively new, this type of work isn't new to me at all. When I went through and destroyed most of my 45 years worth of visual diaries last year I discovered some old 'social commentary' type cartoons - like the one below. Which is proof that deep down, people don't really change, they just get older.

Images: 

1. Screen shot definition

2. Author. Original hand drawn, digitally redrawn and coloured

3. Author. Original hand drawn with mapping pen on paper c. 1990s

Losing the Human Race

Image: Author. Digitally drawn and manipulated collage.

I've had 45 years to get used to the idea that human civilisation will, at some point in my lifetime, descend into an 'apocalypse'. I was 15 in 1975 when I dreamed about it. This particular apocalyptic dream presented an image of immeasurably tall metal structures stretching high into the sky, breaking  apart and crashing to the ground. Even at 15, long before I got into spiritaul philosophy and Jung, I knew it was significant. I had several of these epic dreams. I tried to draw the destruction, to make sense of it and get it out of my head - but I failed.

Over my lifetime I've had quite a few of what I now know to be 'numinous' dreams. I have learnt to trust that they are archetypal because they are accompanied by a couple of signifiers. First of all - I always wake abruptly in dread, sit bolt upright in the bed with the sound of my own heart beating wildly and loudly in my ears. It's a strange disembodied sensation, like my heart is actually inside my head. In that instant I know, without doubt, this dream is a message from the unconscious and it is telling me something very important. The second is harder to articulate - it's a sense of 'gnosis', of knowing beyond doubt that this dream holds a fundamental truth that I should not ignore. There is a quality about it that is impossible to dismiss.

The language of dreams is symbolic. If the physical signs hadn't been there, this dream would have had a different meaning. Some dreams are more personal, they come from the 'personal' unconscious and uncover hidden aspects of your own psyche. They are still valuable, but they are more to do with what's going on in your own consciousness, your own life.

“Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.” [Collected Works Volume 10, paragraph 317]

Jung saw dreams as the psyche’s way of communicating important things because they alerted the individual to what was really going on. Knowing what is going on is important in what Jung called the process of 'individuation' or the evolution of individual consciousness.

My apocalypse dream wasn't a 'personal' dream. Jung also wrote about the 'archetypal unconscious' - the shared, timeless repository of human consciousness. In my thesis I decided to use the term 'numen' for this realm - just to separate it from the quagmire of the 'unconscious' that Freud also wrote about. For me, 'numen' is akin to 'Godhead'.

'The numen makes its presence known in various ways, 'as a numinous dream, a waking vision, an experience in the body....in the wilderness....' (Corbett in Frantom, 2013:22)

Despite the fact that I am keeping up the 'good fight' by sharing and commenting on socials about topics that range from climate change to Trump to multi-nationals and the environment - deep in my heart I know it is futile. I'm fighting because it's what humans do - it's that old survival instinct kicking in. In the end instinct is no match for the numinous dream, or what I am witnessing right now with my own eyes.

Image: Author. Digitally manipulated collage.

Super-viruses, environmental degradation, fires, species' extinction, acidification of the oceans, reduction of rainfall in already drought-prone areas, degraded soils, plastics, overpopulation, powerful multi-nationals replacing impotent governments, #Cult 45 signalling not only the death of democracy but decency and ethics - you don't need a dream to convince you that the human race is nearly over. And it looks like we are going to lose.

Michelle Frantom, 'Her Beauty & Her Terror: Portrait of an Archetypal Land'

Jung & Dreams