My artwork often comes from my passion for Carl Jung and my encounters with my unconscious. I also have a great liking for the art of Salvador Dali.
For me, there’s a deeper reality than the obvious one – a reality of symbols, myths and dreams. It’s a reality that is deeply surreal. What I aspire to is to express this world with my art.
Jung’s theories centred around how we develop as individuals – the process he called individuation. Individuation unites our ‘normal’ selves with our unconcious. the unconscious. Coming to terms with these is our life’s journey.
One way that Jung recommended to do this was to try to depict them. And I have found that somehow by creating an artistic representation of these characters, it helps brings them into my consciousness.
Jung characterised unconscious elements as archetypes – mythic-like characters that represent fundamental human motifs. And these are the strange characters often appear in my work. For me, these are representations of what I catch glimpses of in my dreams and fantasies – and by showing them I slowly come to terms with what is inside me.
For more on Jung’s ideas of individuation, see here.
My Backstory
I studied graphic design 20 years ago at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. Foolishly I had decided to start an English magazine; the winter of 1999 saw me in the university library hacking text and images into a form where they would sit well in a design. What I was doing (although I didn’t realise it then) was learning composition.
The magazine went spectacularly bust, and a few years later I found myself in Egypt, where I began selling yoga holidays. I needed a website and so began my second design learning. Back then websites were fairly new – and creating something aesthetically pleasing that also worked as a sales tool took me many months in a dusty internet cafe on the Red Sea coast.
Along with websites I began producing videos. Not much still exists from that time, but this is one promo video I made with friends in Egypt’s Sinai desert.
Since I got back from Egypt I’ve been an environmental activist and also in business. I’ve made digital 3D models of solar PV systems, anti-fracking campaign materials, and a collection of yoga dolls.
I also began to teach acroyoga, an intensely aesthetic (as well as fun) sort of yoga, and whose visuals inspired me to make videos.
More recently I entered into Jungian analysis and realised that there were deep parts of myself that I had no idea existed. Part of analysis is to try to represent what we find; when I understood that my drawings of my dreams were not up to scratch I knew a new part of my life had begun – and I began to draw.
Given all that, I have a good understanding post production – basically the digital side. Drawing by hand fairly new to me, but I try and use what techniques I have learnt to express a world that goes beyond the day to day.