Archetype, Dream, the Depth of the Soul: The Collective Creation of a Painting

In the previous text, in trying to understand who truly creates a painting, we arrived at the conclusion that a painting is created by three equal components – the artist’s personality, the psyche, and nature. Even though a painting, as a work of art, does not belong to its author, and lives its own independent life after its creation, the significance of the author in the creative process does not diminish. The author, as a person, can either help or hinder their own art – and this has a real effect on the process by which a painting comes into being. The better the artist’s personality is able to give form, a tangible shape, to the archetype – the formless material within our psyche – the more wondrous the painting that emerges. And conversely, if a person is unable to give a tangible shape to the archetype of creation residing in their psyche, a potentially brilliant painting remains unrealized, never having seen the light of day.

Without the creator’s personality there would be no art, yet there would also be no genius art without the archetype of creation, without the collective unconscious within our psyche. These two components that create a painting – the artist’s personality and the psyche – depend on one another. So in this text I invite you to get acquainted with the second component that creates a painting – the psyche. What are you able to imagine or understand about the creation of a painting when you hear words such as “archetype, the depth of the soul, dream, daydream, collectivity, the unconscious”? It seems that all these words are joined by something “spiritual,” perhaps even “mystical,” something that is not physical, visible, or tangible. In the first text of this series we examined how it is precisely the collective unconscious within the psyche that is the part which awakens, in the artist’s consciousness, the desire or need to create, to paint a picture. The collective unconscious is one of the three parts of our psyche and has a real effect on our behavior, including our acts of creation.

So in this text I invite you to focus with me not so much on the operating principle of the collective unconscious, which we have already examined in earlier texts, but rather on the question – what is that collective unconscious made of? What is so important, so invaluable within it, what material composes it, that the world’s most brilliant works are born from it? Does “something” compose it at all? Why do we call it a dream, a daydream, the depth of the soul?

The collective unconscious is an accumulation of archetypal energy within our psyche, however, contrary to what is widely believed in society at large, archetypes are NOT a shared human experience that has “settled” within the human psyche. Archetypes have no concrete expression whatsoever – they are neither a concrete experience nor concrete images or ideas present in the psyche, but only certain predispositions, biological matrices or trajectories, which every human being – every representative of the species homo sapiens – possesses as a given. This means that the collective unconscious is NOT made of anything; it is not a place where a certain material, content, or collective experience accumulates and can, once it surfaces, become a painting or another work of art. It is merely the POSSIBILITY of this material, of this content, of this potential painting. Archetypes, once they reach the field of consciousness, express themselves through images, yet in themselves they are not images. They become images only once archetypal energy reaches consciousness and consciousness itself creates, out of this energy, an image, a concrete content, a clear idea, some kind of experience. So what is unique about this archetypal energy in the creative process, if in itself it holds “nothing of content”? Why do we call it the rich depth of the soul, from which we draw the greatest wellsprings of creation?

Archetypes are the richest depth of our soul, our psyche, our being, because only their energy awakens, in the artist’s personality, such images, ideas, thoughts and experiences that nothing else in the world can awaken. Archetypal energy that has reached the field of consciousness expresses itself as an image, a concrete content, yet this image is not merely an image encompassing the sense of sight. An image can also be auditory, tactile, taking expression through movement. However, the most common images are those that arise in archetypal (not personal-unconscious or conscious) dreams, fantasies, daydreaming, and they can also be involuntary thoughts, ideas that seem to arise out of nowhere. The artist, whether he wants it or not, finds certain thoughts coming to him, becomes absorbed in a daydream, a fantasy rises before his eyes, and he only comes back to himself “after some time has passed.” Only the energy of the collective unconscious can provoke such images in the artist’s consciousness, images which he ultimately incorporates into a work of art.

We see that within the collective unconscious we will not find any content that we could simply take out and transfer onto a painting or another work of art. The collective unconscious is energy that awakens the artist’s imagination. And it is the artist’s imagination itself that, out of those surges of energy, creates rich, unique, brilliant images which become a wondrous painting. Without this energy, arising from the deepest layer of our psyche (the collective unconscious being the layer most removed from consciousness), which Bachelard calls the depth of the soul, the artist would not succeed in creating the unique images that move us. The artist would have no possibility of doing so, for the archetype is the possibility of the painting.

Through their energy, archetypes awaken the artist’s imagination, yet they hand that imagination nothing concrete – only the possibility of something concrete. For Gaston Bachelard, who studied creativity, the imagination is the most dynamic and powerful force of the soul, capable of altering what exists and creating its own distinct reality: the artist has before him the visible reality and, within himself, the unfathomable depth of the psyche; he, as it were, “mixes” this depth of the psyche, this archetypal energy, with external reality, and in this way creates images that transcend that reality, images that are unique, powerful, and that become the greatest works of art. So a necessary condition in the creative process, in painting a picture, is to transfer one’s inner images, one’s daydream, the dream that is born as archetypal energy surges into consciousness, into what we see on the outside. According to Bachelard, “the sensory world is infinitely small,” and so the sensory, external world alone is not enough to create a work of genius. A painting of genius requires archetypal energy, which gives the artist the POSSIBILITY of dreaming up unique images, sounds, movements, ideas – things that turn into content and become a painting.

In trying to understand what is so especially important, so invaluable within the collective unconscious for the creation of a painting, we arrived at the conclusion that the collective unconscious, otherwise known as the “depth of the soul,” holds the possibility of the painting. Yet in examining this question of the inner human world, we also touched a little upon the question of the outer world, of reality, in the creative process. The imagination does not create unique images purely out of itself; it also draws on the sensory images that exist outside. How does the visible, tangible reality – what we call the “outer world” – contribute to the creation of a painting? We have arrived at the third component that creates a painting – nature. I invite you to explore it in the final text of this series, “The Daydream Is Born of Nature and Belongs to Nature.” Malevich’s Black Square. How Does Nature Create an Abstract Painting?”.

Text by Anžela Duchovska