The topic for this week’s lecture is PSYCHOLOGY. Yayyy!! This is an absorbing topic for me. OK, back to my blog.
In a famous german psychologist, Sigmund Freud’s theory on dreams, said dreams were the way to “disconnect from our reality by extinguishing all external stimuli”. Freud also believed the dream was composed of the “manifest content” and “latent content”. The manifest content is a “disguised representation of the true thought underlying the dream”. The latent content holds the “forbidden thoughts and the unconscious desires” of the dream.
(notes in PowerPoint)
Many artists use the dreamspace or dreamscape as a style in their work ,such as a New Zealand artist, Seraphine Pick. Pick’s work is a largely psychological. Some parts of the figures and objucts are clear but some are not which is suggesting a dream or memories. As Freud has mentioned in his theory on dreams, dream is a way to release ourself from the reality. Pick used the function of the dream to creat her fantasy world. The memories could appear in a dream. So she used the figures and objects from the reality and painted them in an abstract way. She changed the sacle of the figures and objects. Some parts of the figures/objects are distinct as remembered clearly and some parts are vague as the other memories returned as fragments or mental impressions. In addition, many of the figures in her work are masked which brings the tensions and ambiguities into the painting. It is also a way to “re-express from a contemporary perspective the anxiety embedded in the female image”(notes in PowerPoint).
