‘Carole Berman’s work is a brave and marvellous exploration of numinous inner worlds’
Kathleen Raine
Love and Death
Entering Carole’s studio is for me like stepping direct into the imagination, for there the archetypes and all their constellating nebulae swarm across canvases that jolt one into a breathtaking recognition of magic and myth.
While Carole’s mystic influences include the Zohar, alchemy, and most obviously the writings of C.G. Jung, in her predisposition to mandala shapes; there are however two very powerful forces at work in her paintings. These are Eros and Thanatos. Love and Death.
While Love and Death are as absolutes, one, this state of unity is achieved only through the artist’s courage in pursuing a journey that reconciles conflicting opposites. I am often moved by seeing Carole’s physical stature against the size of her paintings. She can be seen reaching for the heavens she has created. All of that has come from all of this within.
It’s in the painting ‘Mystery of Meeting’ that an interface between love and death, and commitment and loss, is established within a charged emotional precinct. Here time and timelessness, and hope and despair meet in powerful discourse, and it is ‘seeing’ that tells the story. He may be observed looking away in pain, as though the apprehension of losing love is more potent than that of finding it.
The compassion conveyed through her eyes indicates stay, even though love in its entirety is cruel and subject to change. The intense rainbowing backdrop to the meeting is presided over by faces who may be conceived as guardians in an arena of seeing and knowing. The artist is situated here in the context of being unable to alter her own vision. She is seen as both embracing and affirming the irremediable mystery of love. Painting is no more about safety than love. Both demand the risk of the eagle in finding its summit.
I would love to stay in this paragraph with the notion of courage. To create from the interior selves is to make an articulate raid on the unconscious. It’s a very different process from those who paint the visible world. Carole’s art is about the re-creation of the universe. It brings internal energies into complementary balance with external ones. The dominants in this journey are beauty and terror. The risks of breakdown are correspondingly high. Carole’s mandalas are sometimes safety-nets into which the artist falls.
Jung’s concern with the mandala, developed at a time of deep inner crisis in his life. In his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he tells us, ‘I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day-to-day . . . Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: ‘Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s, eternal re-creation.’
Carole’s instinctual methods of working are not dissimilar to Jung’s initial mandala discoveries. Her paintings grow out of sketches, which in turn may originate from dream-images. The intensely lively and unmediated imagery that fills the sketchbooks presents the imagination live. The images crackle as though they have been extracted from hot fat, maintain their heat there, and are later transposed to the canvas. I like the feeling of volatility and valency in Carole’s work. It is as though a meteoric storm is blowing at the time of inspiration, and that the visionary heavens have opened to reveal their contents.
There is a distinctly Blakean feel evident in the archetypal arena expressed in ‘For Love Is Strong As Death’. The assemblage of figures imagined into symbolic opposition, in part representing love, and in part representing death, are grouped here in expectation and loss. Victims of either cancer or Aids are seen upheld by angels, while the figure of death confronts the despairing lovers. Somewhere in the canvas we see the figure of the artist, externalized in her own creation, and determined to be actively involved in the realisation of her vision. There is redemption here too, in the sense of physical and spiritual union, and in the blue pool and blue waters of a river suggesting regeneration. A whole living world has been created as an inescapable reality in which we are all involved. Rich with personal allusions, this painting seems to me to represent the place at which the artist has arrived at this stage of her continuously expansive inner journey.
Carole divides her time between London and Jerusalem, and the isolation entailed by her work of visualizing psyche is accentuated by the light and solitude attendant on her Jerusalem days. I would say that vision collects in her consciousness, the way clouds slowly build to a collective. For the artist it’s a continuous process of what Rilke called ‘becoming’.
It’s in paintings like ‘The Three Sisters’, ‘Adam’, ‘Eve’ and ‘Eve and Her Children’ that we discover the connections that Carole has made between shamanic ritual, and the associations existing between the Sefirot in the Tree of Life, and the chakras of the body.
Adam is seen as personifying the animal kingdom. His component selves are identified with the shaman’s abilities to assimilate and project the creature-world. But like Eve, his body is constellated by diagrammatic circles containing the faces of multiple selves. Body in this instance represents consciousness, and no part of it is excluded from a sense of vital awareness and animation. Eve is fecund with the possibilities of birth, and is depicted in a circular rush of kinetic energy. She is seen as the Tree of Life somatized into human form. The numinously stormy light haloed around her as aura is in contrast to the serene blue pool out of which she may have stepped. Eve’s dynamic is one of electrifying unrestraint.
Creation is continuous, and as Jung noted, myths are not the isolated subjects of the past, but more the archetypal arrangements of the present. Carole’s religio-mythic personae are also the walk-ins and extra-terrestrials who have come to inhabit twentieth century consciousness. Her ‘Three Sisters’ could be construed as having arrived from interplanetary travels. For Carole, these three figures suggest ‘both a personal and a collective sisterhood’. I’m drawn to the fact that of the two homunculi visible in the painting, one of them is in the act of flying, as though this should be a natural part of psychic activity. Readers of J.G. Ballard’s extraordinary novel The Unlimited Dream Company, will know that man should be no stranger to flight, and that what is sometimes confined to dream activity may in the future become a magical extension to living. Carole’s paintings, like Ballard’s novels, are pointers to limitless possibilities of inner expansion within human potential.
The painting ‘Eve and Her Children’ presents us with another stage of transformation in the artist’s journey. The extravagantly red-haired Eve, accompanied by her universal family, is a figure considerably more earthed than her dynamized prototype, who is fertile with the possibilities of birth. It’s a more solid, primal, earth-mother, who offers a supportive hand to her children. The disembodied, planetary faces who constellate the protective circle drawn around her are luminous with the idea of apparent birth, and appear to be in the process of being reborn. More sombre in its colouring than the Eve whose neurology extends to the Tree of Life, this painting, with its earthy tones, celebrates birth in a manner that is to be fully realised in the painting ‘Goddess’.
Carole often refers to her paintings as maps of the unconscious, and to the transformations within her work as a map-making process. With characteristic modesty, she tirelessly confronts the illimitable frontiers of inner space as a voyager working towards the expansion of psyche, and as someone little interested in using creative expression for the concretization of ego. If we are receptive to the molecular activity of imagery, and its dialectic with soul, then our work is about retrieving the lost continents of the unconscious. A poem or a painting brings their existence into a time-frame. In the way that a camera lens clarifies focus, so the image acts as an interface between inner and outer realities. Carole’s archetypes, like Adam and Eve, have made a long journey through space to situate themselves within the artist’s consciousness. We should greet them for their arrival on the painting’s planetary surface.
It’s in the painting ‘Goddess’, a theme originally inspired by a visit to Crete, and studying there the cult of the Minoan fertility goddess, that the artist most forcefully celebrates the superabundance of birth. The process of conception is protected here by the circle, as are the numbers of the newly born. The serenity in the goddess’s face seems to suggest that birth, if it is activated by magical sources, implies a pleasurable experience rather than one characterized by agonizing labour pains. The goddess is surrounded by tutelary spirits, who assist her in the fluent expulsion of children.
The non-dual perspective implied by this painting, in which integration and self-renewal are seen as the unifying themes, professes the power of the archetype to heal inner crisis and disorientation. ‘Goddess’ is an affirmation of the universal healing process, as it co-exists in both the artist and her painting.
In Carole’s exhibitions, the seer finds himself seen. There are eyes looking out at the world in every painting. The notion of the artist seeing both reality, as well as a world coloured by inner contents, is perfectly expressed by Octavio Paz who understood: ‘The eyes, on seeing this or that, confirm both the reality of what they see and their own reality.’
In the painting ‘Visionary Eye’, the central, cyclopean focus of a blue eye is complemented by a second and a third situated at the side, and we imagine a fourth eye looking out at the rear. Suspended in space, and all-seeing, the object immediately brings to mind a being or flyover in inner space.
There are of course other connotations that come to mind with this painting. The visionary eye is also Shiva’s eye, which opens only in relation to mystic vision orchestrated by the body’s chakras. The image also reminds me of a capsule built to travel through dream worlds, and one that is specifically constructed to contain the artist on her voyage between the complex states of reality.
‘Eclipse of the Sun’ and ‘Eclipse of the Moon’ continue the theme of the watcher being watched. In both drawings I am reminded of Eliot’s line in The Waste Land, which is lifted from Dante’s Inferno: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The idea of the vast, anonymous undead, queuing to re-enter the world, comes to mind. Their waiting is silent, and their faces largely uniform – notice that none are looking away – and both crowds are brought to light by the event of an eclipse. If an eclipse is construed as a partial planetary disappearance, or the interposition of a shadow between the seeing eye and the object of its focus, then in both these paintings we can discover a connection between consciousness and the shadow. Again it’s the bridge-building capacities of psyche in Carole’s work that allow us to structure metaphors for ‘becoming’ in both drawings. Are the faces constellated in psyche, like cells in a honeycomb? Are they always component parts of identity, and if they are, what has suddenly made them visible to the artist? I ask these questions, because they reflect on the nature of visionary experience. Inspiration is sometimes like throwing a light switch. A space which was previously dark, jumps into the light. In the mandala central to the solar eclipse, the constellatory faces seem to have appeared from the black light of deep space the molecular fireball of inspiration or prana may be interpreted as the luminous punctum foregrounded in the mandala.
I would say that all imaginative undertaking involves personal biology intersecting with the collective unconscious. The difference between the imaginative artist and the realist is the difference between a diver and a swimmer. One is prepared to explore the deeps, the other remains on the surface. Carole’s paintings are about retrieving images from the deep psyche, in the way that a diver returns with shells from the seabed. The paintings are all about depth-feel, and so contain the wonder of things which have exchanged elements, and have crossed over from unconscious to conscious dimensions. They are here to be included in reality, in the way that the unnumerable faces in the eclipse drawings look at us from the assurance of their own occupying space.
In the two mandala paintings, ‘Rose Window I’ and ‘Rose Window II’, we enter into the evocative personal mythology out of which so much of Carole’s work transpires. It is impossible to approach these two paintings without a profound sense of awe for the universe they present. These two works bring into reconciliation the relation between the potential and the actual, the unconscious and the conscious worlds. The balancing-point in each may be likened to a spider in its circular web. The spider’s vibrations keep the web’s resonance perfectly tuned. And here too we have the squaring of the circle, a mystic concept advocated by the alchemists.
Both mandalas are occupied by faces which are predominantly beautiful; the central face in ‘Rose Window II’ being particularly expressive of a luminous aesthetic that unites inner with outer beauty. The hard-won process of self-realisation, achieved through the transformative stages of arriving at discovery within the painting are pitched at the highest level of awareness in these two paintings. In relation to the squaring of the circle, which is the powerful archetypal motif at play in both ‘Rose Window’ paintings, Jung tells us: ‘The quaternity of the One is the schema for all images of God, as depicted in the visions of Ezekial, Daniel, and Enoch, and as the representation of Horus with his four sons . . .’
Carole’s awareness of what Kathleen Raine has called ‘the learning of the imagination’ has had her deepen her reading over the years, to take in not only the works of Jung and his contemporaries, but those of Dante, Goethe, and Rilke, as well as areas of modern poetry and scientific discovery.
Let me return to Carole’s London studio. The walls are white, and the impacted silence explosive with the energies in her paintings. When I visit her there, it’s like going home. Going home to the source of the imagination that informs the ‘Mystery of Meeting’.
Jeremy Reed