The Mythic Imagination

An excerpt from a chapter entitled ‘Art as a Symbol of Feeling’ written by Laurence Caruana.

Initially, the art of Kim Nelson seems to share much with Maschka - the alluring feminine figure surrounded by Nature and embodying its soulful as well as sensual beauty. But the longer we look, we also find an affinity with Machalek - a swirling mixture of light and darkness which eventually find their unity in a luminous center. Above all, Nelson’s art is a life-long journey, in search of experience and awakening, to express his ever-expanding vision.

Kim Nelson was born in Kiama, a village on the east coast of Australia. As the fifth child in a farming family, his unusual inclination towards drawing and dreams naturally gave his parents cause for concern. “Dreams actually played a more unsettling role in my upbringing. Nightmares (or rather, portentous dreams) became a regular occurence around the age of nine.”

But, drawing became an instinctual way for him to explore the unusual world of the interior. “I developed a hunger for myth and legend and my interest in art tended to reflect this... At an early age I discovered Albrecht Dürer and felt a strong kinship. I consider him my guardian angel. I was amazed to discover that he had had a dream of a deluge that paralleled my own, and that he had illustrated it in watercolor...”

And so, after finishing high school, Nelson went to Sydney to hone his drawing skills at the Julian Ashton Art School, which emphasized life drawing. “Drawing is elementary to me and fundamental in the development of any artwork. It was the first form of art I did as a child and I find the act of drawing is still the purest and most direct form of expression.”

But the art scene in Australia, with its gallery politics and emphasis on Modernism, soon discouraged Nelson from pursing painting as a career. The next eighteen years of his life were spent in a variety of practical and creative endeavors: “I worked in graphic design to pay the bills and became involved in contemporary music to satisfy my creative needs.” In all, he spent ten years in graphic design and advertising while playing music as a singer/songwriter in bands on nights and weekends.
Then, rather by chance, he found himself as the manager/curator of galleries and museums, such as the National Trust of Australia. “When the music fell apart in 1984 I decided to get out of Sydney for a short break. I took a Graphic Design job in Canberra and ended up with the National Trust.”

But his successes as a curator in Canberra failed to fulfill the deeper longing to express himself through his own paintings. Though he continued to curate and also exhibited as a painter for the next eight years, he was not able to focus on his art exclusively. Suddenly, a series of events made him re-consider his life up to that point.

“In November 1995 a friend I admired died tragically in an accident in Antarctica - he fell from a mountain side that he used to climb every evening to watch the sunset. I loved his passion, he had achieved so much and though he had much still to give, I believe his was a life well lived. His death affected me.."

But this was not an isolated incident. Within that same time period, another acquaintance died, re-inforcing the feeling of mortality as the artist approached mid-life. He was forced to look back and re-assess where he had come from and how much he had accomplished. According, once more, to Nelson:

“It wasn’t till a few years ago when two friends I greatly admired died in pretty much the same year, that I started to review my life. I realized that I couldn’t live with the idea of lying on my death bed knowing that I hadn’t given my gift a chance.”

In 1996, Nelson gave up his career in curating and turned to painting full-time. All the ideas for paintings which he had never had time to express now came tumbling out. He also brought his skills from the previous years in curating to organize his own exhibitions. Now, living and working in the alpine foothills not far from Canberra, Nelson feels that the long circuitous path to a career in painting has offered many unusual experiences and insights: “It has only been recently that I have been able to concentrate on and develop my art and I am only now starting to understand the visionary nature of it. Perhaps it was meant to be a journey and I have been gathering the experiences to channel into my work.”

A fine example of Nelson’s more recent work may be found in When a Saint Starts Hiding Sin (2003). The landscape and the principle figure are charged with movement and meaning. The dark clouds gathering over the mountains may soon obscure the bright shining sun. And the figure herself seems to be suddenly caught unaware of a certain act and its impending consequences. The overall atmosphere is one of expectation. But what imminent event is about to occur?

View ‘When a Saint Starts Hiding Sin

“This work came to me in a dream and so I drew a rough sketch as soon as I awoke. And that is where it stayed for the best part of a year until I felt confident to attempt a major work. As to its meaning? Well, that was another reason I had to let it lie fallow. I heard the line ‘When a saint starts hiding sin’ and I knew straight away that was its title, without quite understanding why. It has something to do with people and things not always being as they wish to appear. The painting features a setting that is almost biblical, but why is the figure suddenly checking over her shoulder?”
The artist’s own curiosity attests to his use of dreams and the unconscious in creating a work of art. His prescient dreams began when he was still quite young, and his fascination with Dürer developed in part because the great German artist had also once rendered a watercolor of a cataclismic dream foretelling an imminent deluge. That omenous and foreboding atmosphere is also present in this painting. The predictive capacity of the unconscious must never be underestimated. At times, the unconscious is able to warn us of impending events, even if consciousness remains quite ignorant of them.

“I tend to dream subjects up so I guess my work falls into the category of visionary art. That’s not to say that I don’t draw inspiration from the real world but that I am simply predisposed to the other. Ideas come to me ‘out of the blue’ and it is a source of eternal frustration that the actualizing of these ideas rarely match the dream. I’ll be the first to tell you that my dreams far outweigh my skills.”

Feu is another painting that imparts Nelson’s cataclismic vision of the world, but this one is based on an actual event. It evokes the massive forest fires which raged out of control close to Canberra in January of 2003.

View ‘Feu’

“I live fifty kilometers from the capital. For weeks we lived with the smoke pall and we even readied for evacuation twice when the fires came to within two kilometers of my home. If you have ever fought or been in the presence of a large fire, there is little doubt that it resembles a creature, a living entity with a mind of it’s own that is hard to predict. In the presence of Nature’s awesome power we are so insignificant...”

As with the previous painting, so here the artist has concentrated and personified Nature’s power into the form of a woman. Since time immemorial, artists have represented the sublime and destructive powers of Nature through woman’s equally fierce and intriguing aspects. Nelson’s women also have that quality: beautiful and spiritual, at once inviting and frightening.

As with Maschka, Nelson’s depiction of woman is inspired by the thresholds he has crossed over in life. Woman is not the erotic ideal of a young male’s fantasy, but a far more soulful creature where even conflicting qualities may harmoniously co-exist: creative and destructive, attractive and terrifying. The mysteries she personifies lie so deeply in her nature, that Nature herself expresses them through her.

In The Lady of Shalot (1996), Nelson renders his own interpretation of J.W. Waterhouse’s well-known painting, based on a few lines from Tennyson’s poem: “...And at the dimming of the day She loosed the chain and down she lay The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott.” In the painting by Waterhouse, the boat with its comely maiden is viewed from the side, leaving her destination unclear. “After viewing the original Waterhouse painting in the Tate Gallery I thought; ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to place the viewer on the other side of the subject, using many of the same components as seen in the painting...”

View ‘The Lady of Shalot’

Nelson gives Waterhouse’s verson a quarter-turn, resulting in his own variation on Tennyson’s theme. Now we can see into the boat, where Nelson has placed a few more personal elements, besides Waterhouse’s crucifix and the three candles. As well, the face of Nelson’s heroine differs: her expression is more inward. Most important of all, we see that her boat is destined for a distant isle.

‘The Isle of the Dead?’ The theme of the ‘boat journey’ returns, as a barque brings its occupent to some unknown destination. Is she setting out towards death? The three candles on Waterhouse’s boat offer us a clue since, as Nelson notes, “the three candles represent three stages of life, with the last candle having just gone out.” But Tennyson’s poem, like Nelson’s painting, leaves the nature of that distant shore vague: “The broad stream bore her far away...”

This leads us to wonder if the woman’s journey is not toward the interior rather than the exterior. “In the epic poem, is the lady’s plight actual or psychological?” Nelson wonders. The inward-looking maiden may have set out towards Nature, but she may soon discover the mysteries that lie deep within her own nature.

Whatever the case may be, it is at once fascinating and disturbing how the artists in this chapter, though generations and continents apart, have turned to the same timeless imagery to express the passage through life. Not only is the mythic boat journey an ever-repeating leitmotif, but we have also seen those three candles before in Maschka’s Know Thyself - elements which, for him, ‘remained enigmatic...’

View ‘Eloe’

In Eloe (1998) Nelson offers us an intensely evocative image which moves our vision onto a higher spiritual plain. In fact, certain elements seen in the previous paintings repeat themselves here. The sun, centrally located in the upper portion of When a Saint Starts Hiding Sin re-appears here in the same place. And the central figure of a woman also recurrs, except now she is purely ethereal and angelic. As the catalogue to a 2001 exhibition expressed it, ‘Nelson’s work is a mysterious alchemy of sensuality and spirituality.’ Now spirituality gains the upper hand. In this painting, no landscape is present; there is nothing to tie woman to ever-changing Nature. Instead she emerges as luminous and transcendent.

Interestingly, the artist remarks that, “Eloe existed without the central figure for some time. It became complete when I witnessed a performance of Dru Yoga. In their teachings, letting in the ‘light’ and letting go of the ‘rubbish’ is central... The pose depicted in the painting, though suggesting the angelic, is actually a frozen moment of a Dru Yoga movement...”
This painting freezes a moment in time, and offers an ancient ritualistic gesture from India’s yoga tradition. Such a gesture, when properly performed with a clear mind and open heart, will momentarily transform the person ennacting it. It will center him, body and mind, at a higher level of awareness. As such, Nelson’s painting is also, in the yogic tradition, a pratima - an image for meditation. By concentrating our vision onto it for an extended period of time, we may see our higher Self mirrored in the central figure. And, rising even higher, we may also find our reflection in the timeless expanse of pure light above her - a luminous unity that wordlessly and without images reveals the innermost source of our awareness.

In this way, Nelson’s vision continually expands through those isolated events in life that resonate with myth and mystery. ‘Perhaps it was meant to be a journey’ he had said earlier, referring to his circuitous life-path, ‘and I have been gathering the experiences to channel into my work.’ Those more personal events have been transformed through his art into new mythic icons for our times. With equal emphasis on sensuality and spirituality, the artist has fused images of woman and the world into singular works of beauty and transcendence.

Both Maschka and Nelson, as artists at life’s mid-day, have arrived at that point where they may look back at their accomplishments, and forward to the tasks that await. That backward glance, once it is prolonged, becomes a labyrinthine journey where the artist as alchemist attempts to unite all opposites in himself. Woman appears, in the maze of his mind, as erotic and soulful, a mystery as intriguing and secretive as Nature herself. Caught in the sphinx’s eternal gaze, mesmerized by her wide open eyes, his image of woman becomes an engima without end.

‘The Mythic Imagination: Art as symbol for feeling’ by Laurence Caruana from the book ‘Eyes of the Soul Exploring Inspiration in Visionary Art and Artists’ by Prof. Philip Rubinov-Jacobson