The first take home assignment is to draw a doorway with oil pastel. My instinct is to create the space between two mirrors--a doorway for looking. We document what we see by questioning in a stagewise process.
What is manifest in the image?
What is the latent content?
How do we respond to the image and its symbols? What feelings and thoughts are brought up by the drawing, and what is our relationship to it?
In class we discuss our productions for hours. One piece could generate a long discussion between two people, and we are over a dozen. To conclude Bonnie reads a poem:
Either you will go through this door or you will not go through. If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name. Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen. If you do not go through it is possible to live worthily to maintain your attitudes to hold your position to die bravely but much will blind you, much will evade you, at what cost who knows? The door itself makes no promises. It is only a door.
"Prospective Immigrants Please Note" by Adrienne Rich. We are told that titling work teaches people to look at what we want them to see.
I see water form instantaneously on the surface of the mirror that holds my silhouette. It flows up against the edges of image, and it's going to crash. I will have to change my stance very quickly, if I'm going to flow with it.
Here's a title - "Condensation" - In Freudian interpretation of dreams condensation is called 'a primary psychical process'. In image-work like dream-work, our mind 'is under some kind of necessity to combine all the
sources which have acted as stimuli for the dream into a single unity in the dream itself' (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Avon Books, 1998, p.212).
The drawing represents what I am doing at this stage in my project to become an art therapist. I'm reflecting on my own psychology. I think it is a well defended representation of my current situation. I'd like to explore
where these symbols lead in further drawings.
Click the image for hi-res &/or super close-up viewing.