ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2013 Issue 2

David Blum was a distinguished musician and writer, who documented his singular, inner journey in dream images, text, and music, over a thirty-five year period.
 
The forty-four exquisite digital reproductions of the original oil pastel paintings, are each accompanied by a rich and penetrating commentary, derived from the following primary sources: David Blum's unpublished "Pictures from the Unconscious," personal diaries, dream journals, and the DVD documentary, entitled "Appointment with The Wise Old Dog," produced in 1998, when David Blum was dying from cancer. Image and text reveal an unfolding story of a man's path towards wholeness, in which he faces death, yet experiences a healing transformation. David Blum's "Pictures from the Unconscious" should serve as a deep well for all of us, inspiring and guiding our own search for wisdom as often as we choose to drink from its rich source.

 
INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BLUM
 
My collection of paintings represent a lifetime encounter with the pictorial language offered to me by the unconscious. In a sense, I have been a kind of scribe these past thirty-five years whose medium has been pastel oil crayons. Some of the imagery has come from dreams, some from waking visions. The first of these forty-four paintings, "The Pastoral Symphony," refers back to a 1953 dream I had in Paris when I was seventeen years old. This dream proved to be foundational to my life and all that has followed flows from that central experience.
 
The continual challenge was how to structure the material while not impeding the flow. The archetypal nature of much of the collection renders a strictly chronological order quite meaningless and arbitrary -- the inner world is far too rich and replete with nuanced meaning to be neatly categorized. A principle example are the paintings relating to the Anima -- I should say, inspired by this central archetype -- as if she herself drew these powerful convergences of God, Nature and the on-going effort of the psyche to achieve balance through a union of opposites.
 
In my writing there are undoubtedly limitations imposed through the one-sidedness of my conscious attitude. My commentaries are only a hint at the meaning contained in the images and certainly not definitive interpretations. I cannot explain the images....rather they explain me. My conscious words act, at best, as a bridge to an ever deeper realization of the transformative power of the psyche. The images are greater than I am. They suggest immense cycles of psychic life which pass through me and demand to be recorded and assimilated.
 
Read Pictures from the Unconscious in its entirety.