A Painting Not from Experience, but from Dreaming: How Personal Is Eternal Art?

When looking at a painting, reading a book, or listening to a song, do you often wonder what personal experiences drove the author to create this work of art? Or do you dive into the internet to read the author's biography, hoping to find clues about the piece there? What did the author want to say? What idea were they trying to convey? What emotions and feelings did they put into it? It is as though we carry an encoded belief that the author's personal tragedies and joys, downfalls and triumphs, losses, failures, or a passion and love once lived through – if only we could learn of them – would explain the work of art to us. Often the other side, too – the artists themselves – turn back and recount the story of their own lives in order to explain and seemingly justify their creations. Sometimes they even add their own personal history as a component of the painting itself, so that it creates an even stronger, seemingly "deeper," more meaningful impression.

Gustav Klimt, "Death and Life", 1910, photo Wikimedia Commons

Of course, there is also art of this kind – art as an expression of personal experience. As we shall see below, some scholars of creativity are nearly merciless toward such personal art and are even reluctant to call it art at all. And indeed, let us note: a work made up solely of the author's personal experiences (a mere expression of their own conscious experience) is rarely long-lived. But works that cannot be directly matched to the author's experience alone, that reveal themselves to us symbolically, ambiguously, not entirely comprehensibly, elusively, that leave us momentarily stunned upon seeing them, that we cannot let go of and try to decipher as a "riddle," and before which we often feel a reverent awe – these endure and remain relevant for centuries.

The roots of a work of art lie in the impersonal part of our psyche – the collective unconscious. What does "impersonal" mean here? Impersonality means that the collective unconscious is foreign to our personal "I," to our consciousness, to our subjectivity. This means that the creative energy of the collective unconscious is the opposite of what we call personality – the opposite of the artist's personal experiences as an individual, their emotions, thoughts, their experience – it is not bound to any particular person's subjectivity. Have you seen the film „Séraphine” (2008), which tells the story of the life and work of a French painter? This film beautifully illustrates that creation is born from the impersonal part of the artist's psyche, and not because of the artist's experiences. At around 1:33–1:34, the film's heroine Séraphine says: "What I have done frightens me." The artist herself states that she, personally, her consciousness, is FRIGHTENED by what she created. The artist is frightened by her own creation, because that creation, against her personal will, arises from the collective unconscious, from a part of the psyche unknown and foreign to personality.

Carl Gustav Jung – a thinker and psychoanalyst widely respected around the world and recognized for decades now – draws a strict and direct distinction between personal art and art that rises above personality. Jung says that „andlt;...andgt; the essence of a work of art does not lie in the fact that it reflects the peculiarities of its creator – the more of these it contains, the less one can speak of art; the essence of a work of art is that it rises high above personality andlt;...andgt;“. The thinker clearly distinguishes inauthentic creation, dependent on the artist's experiences, from authentic creation, which does not depend on the artist's experiences. A work of art dependent on its creator's experiences tells us less about itself as a work of art than about its creator and their personal life. Such creation, according to the researcher, "deserves to be treated as a neurosis." Thus, such creation becomes not a part of art, but a part of psychology.

In this context, personal creation loses its status as art, because a true work of art is valuable in itself, not because of who its author is or what they experienced in their life. In studying imagination and creation, another world-renowned thinker, Gaston Bachelard, essentially arrives at the same conclusion. Studying images – the material from which a work of art is formed – the thinker states that "images of personal life would be nothing but a reflection of our impoverished 'I'." A painting made up solely of personal images would be impoverished, would quickly grow tiresome, and would fade away. The images of grand and eternal paintings arise not through our experience, but through dreaming, which draws us away from personality.

But how does an artist manage to dream a painting into being, and how does an observer come to understand and feel that painting through dreaming? How is it possible for us to transcend our own personal experience? Through personal experience we can only reach and express surface images, and to reach essential images we must dream as deeply as possible – dream in such a way that this dreaming leads us from the visible surface toward the essence of the image, toward that which can be grasped, contemplated, felt, but not seen. Dreaming is no mysticism. In English this state is called "day-dreaming." To dream means to contemplate with special concentration and devotion, to sink into such a state of mind, a state of active imagination, in which it becomes possible to reach archetypal – collective unconscious – material. In this way the artist begins to dream about that which is unfamiliar, foreign, and other to their personal consciousness. In dreaming, imagination draws the artist further and further away from their personality, deeper and deeper toward their own roots – the archetypes of the collective unconscious – from which autonomous, transpersonal, authentic creation is "born." As Bachelard himself would say, "the highest creation, requiring only inactivity, a dreamlike disposition, in which the world grows clearer the longer we dream while remaining completely still!"

Essentially, the same processes occur when we view art. If, simply by looking at a painting, we manage to concentrate and surrender ourselves so deeply that through imagination we begin to dream – the collective unconscious material within us resonates with the archetypal images present in the painted work. In such a case, the painting increasingly unfolds itself before the observer, evoking that familiar state of deep reverence, admiration, and startling closeness, manifesting as goosebumps running beneath the skin.

A more thorough investigation, in which, setting aside everyday assumptions, we try to understand what creation and a work of art truly are, has revealed to us two new ideas about art: first, that a work of art does not belong to its author; second, that the artist's personality and experience, expressed within the work, undermine and impoverish the work itself, while the artist's ability to transcend their own personality, their ability to dream, creates authentic, enduring art. These two ideas may rightly raise the question: what, then, is the role of the artist as a person in creating a painting? Is the artist not undervalued to too great an extent? And more broadly, if the painting remains without its author, and the author without the painting, then who creates the painting? I invite you to reflect on these questions in the upcoming text in this series, "A Painting Without an Author, an Author Without a Painting. So Who, After All, Creates the Painting?".

Text by Anžela Duchovska