The Red Sun

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.

I looked at his work on the Web, and came across his painting of the Red Sun. To me there was an eerie similarity with the Red Sun and something I had drawn and called 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.

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. I sat down and cried, and cried on and off for the rest of the day. These were not all unhappy tears.

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.


Web Links

The Phillips Collection: The Red Sun
www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/artwork/Dove-Red_Sun.htm

Wikipedia: Arthur Dove
wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Dove

Wikipedia: Archetypes
wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype

The Spiral Maze
www.heartak.com/(15)_high_anxiety.html