A Fine Art Inspiration Blog by Darren Daz Cox

My niece Morgan drew me a piece of art for my birthday! I added it to an illustration of mine!

So I went to the bookstore to get a present for myself and bought a P.K.Dick book, upon reading it I find that the protagonist is the same age as me. There were only two PKD books I considered buying so that’s quite a coincidence, I mean how many books give the age of the hero in the first few pages anyway? so in my strange interpretation of reality there must be some (personal for me) meaning in the book! yea! My sister took me out to dinner and gave me a gift card for my favorite store, Michaels (it’s a big huge arts and crafts store in America)! Today I added another layer on my dragonfly painting I’ll photograph it soon.

Oh, on my birthday it was caterpillars on the beach day, I found one in the tide line so I took the flotsam it was on and put it in the grass (like 8 feet higher than beach thanks to the tremendous erosion from the storm) then I saw more caterpillars running back from the tide as if they had taken a dip and were going to sunbathe. they were all over the place running around on the beach!
Do caterpillars swim? They sure made it look like they do!

I painted the organic frame shapes on these three canvases today. I enjoy the womb like quality of this motif. It might seem a little claustrophobic especially in the ones where there is more frame than actual space for the central art (which really isn’t as important as the frame). Oh sure you can psychoanalyze this and find a reason for why I make these shapes, and they are purely random subconsciously guided shapes.


Below is the intro to a documentary on Christiana Morgan made by a local Monmouth artist Karin Jervert. Psychology is always a fascinating subject especially when it manifests in a romantic tragedy with famous people and artwork to look for ‘clues’ in.

This is an illustration, I think used in the Thematic Apperception Test which was also co-invented by Christiana Morgan. What strikes me, is how similar it is to Raymond Pettibone’s work (or rather the other way around!) Pettibon has been a major influence on my life just ask Biff Brown! (who uploaded a whole new set of songs to his MySpace profile today btw!). I don’t do work that is similar to Pettibon, lord knows I’ve tried (anyone remember my Captain Vigilante comic books? probably not haha!) but I enjoy peeking into the dark side of humanity for entertainment and self analysis.
What I have learned about psychology and the nature of reality in the past two decades is that the more you try to find out what is really real the more you see that it isn’t what has been taught to you in school. The very idea that the subconscious is something primitive and buried under the layers of reality doesn’t hold water anymore except by die hards of the old teachings. The same people who still cling to the fantasy that the great pyramid was built by slaves when it’s just not possible, even today with machines and computors to build it.
It’s more likely that the subconscious is the truth and the conscious is the dream, a lucid dream at that, one where we create it as we go along. Oh sure, you can say that you live in a random universe of unconnected events and definite parameters such as ‘the speed of light’ but facts like synchronicity, pre-cognitive dreams and telepathy keep poking their little gremlin heads into this perceived reality.

If you have studied the basics of quantum physics you can see how faster than light speeds are possible when all matter is part of a zero point field, and you can see that by looking at something, even in ‘laboratory’ conditions changes the outcome of the experiment. Consciousness affects reality, it really does, just try to have a good day, consciously will yourself to have a positive attitude and things will go better for you than if you choose to be grumpy. People with positive attitudes heal faster, doctors can tell you that, and you know it too. Yet we still choose to create scenarios where we are left unhappy and make up excuses such as ‘unrequited love’ to maintain the negative consequences. One reason for this is to learn something from it. If you were happy all the time would you really dig so deep into your soul?

How much of Christiana Morgan’s depression and alcoholism was a result of her own vanity? Seems to me that she could have lived happily ever after and wrote great poetry if she had wanted to.

I suggest that the belief that karl Jung and Henry A. Murray somehow awakened the ‘muse’ in Christiana Morgan was actually just wishful thinking on their part designed to satisfy their lust and a rationalization for the guilt in their ego. Because both great men were so ‘rational’ and respectable they had to create a reason for their lust to use the woman. In order to alleviate their subconscious guilt for manipulating her they placed her on a pedestal as some mythical muse and shrouded the affairs with a veil of mysticism.
Is it any wonder that she turned to alcohol? Is it any wonder her inner pain, from subconsciously realizing she was being used manifested into physical pain?
Just like Freud and his addiction to cigars leading to oral cancer, Jung and Murray couldn’t see how they were using the vain and vulnerable Morgan. Jung and Murray rationalized their process of seduction and ego-gratification and Morgan herself justified her ‘other woman’ status in the way we see that rock-star groupies do, women who are willing to accept a role of being used because their ego is being stroked.

In the big picture this was a lesson for them all, how to be your own person without needing others to make you into someone ‘bigger than yourself’. The world doesn’t need a woman to make a great man like Henry A. Murray it needs people who realize that how they do what they do is the most important thing, not what they do and for what reason.