DREAMTIMEHOTLINE
P A T R I C K R I G G S
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Hi,
I'm Patrick . . .
BFA Senior Thesis on Dreams.mp4As a 2021 spring graduate of the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Portland State University,
I am an emerging interdisciplinary artist with a healthy dose of art history and philosophy who has been working on
sketching and drawing in charcoal, graphite, pen & ink, chalk pastels and colored pencils;
painting in acrylic and watercolor; sculpting in wood, metal, paper, silicon, and plaster.
I have written original African inspired folktales, made a 36-minute illustrated movie of one of them, and
established an ongoing socially engaged art project about dreams
where you are invited to share your dreams at
3 Dreams: your first, your most interesting, and a nightmare.
Among my short-list of personal interests and self-paced studies the writings of Carl Jung are at the top:
Man and His Symbols, The Red Book, The Black Books, Lectures on his technique of "Active Imagination",
and his approach to interpreting dreams--succinctly described in Children's Dreams;
as well as Edinger's The New God-Image: A Study of Jung's Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image.
Jung's analysis of the psyche and his unique perspective on the human condition is both fascinating and illuming.
His ground-breaking work on unearthing the Collective Unconscious and the Self, through the study of symbols via patients, mythology, multicultural folklore, and alchemy, ties together in Depth Psychology what it is
to be human.
“My speech is imperfect.
Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images.
With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.”
C. G. Jung
.
Looking over the art projects I have created in the past year or two you will find that body, mind, and spirit are my underlying themes.
Body: When I depict the human figure it’s simply-clothed or naked. There are no fine draping linens and luscious curves in the fabric. There are no adornments on the head, hands or feet. The figures are lanky and sinewy, and it’s a body for a body’s sake, not for Vitruvian proportions or hyperrealism. I just need a body for a pose and a gesture; to say something in body-language, not to be idealized.
Mind: Here you will find my dreams; images straight out of my head with a story behind each one - something to make you think, at least on a subconscious level. Whether a dream or another imagined image, there is usually some narrative going on to express a psychological state of mind, or convey the signs of some internal question, struggle, or elation.
Spirit: You’ll often find quasi-religious motifs in my work, or symbolism from various spiritual practices, or alchemy, Chinese medicine, subtle energy systems, gnostic mysticism, meditation, or some other metaphysical aspect snuck in there like an Easter egg, or perhaps front and center.
Now the fact is that these can all intermingle quite a bit, and the degree of overlap or the factor of obviousness may vary, but in the end, body, mind, and spirit are the common themes of my work and interest.
. .
In particular, I have been illustrating my dreams. I have kept a dream-journal for a number of years and I have had vivid dreams since I was a child. A few nightmares ago I became interested in the writings of Carl Gustav Jung and learned that analyzing my dreams helped me incorporate my dreams into my conscious life. Instead of awakening in fear and sweat and just wondering, “What the hell was that?” I could practice dream-work and look back on a dream and think “Well, I suppose it means this and that.” Instead of being afraid of some nebulous and ominous feeling all day, I could realize that there was strength emerging in me that I was not accustomed to, power that I was intimidated by but was my own, and I could now name it and claim it, subdue and moderate what once overwhelmed me.
Some dreams are just fascinating to me. They seem to have a message from some other place, some place where someone is watching over me. But the message is usually in another language; instead of being written out clearly, images and feelings are utilized; situations and interactions appear to have some underlying code for me to decipher.
Sometimes I just don’t get it. Plenty of times I just don’t get it. And many of my dreams are just little movies that are showing me what I’ve been thinking about either clearly and intentionally, or quietly off on the distant horizon of my consciousness.
. . .
I hope you enjoy what you find here. And I hope you try to catch the deeper meanings of your own dreams this week; that you do dream-work by writing them down and sketching them out; draw them or paint them or sculpt them. I hope you talk about them to yourself or tell them to someone else, or even act them out in role-play or performances. What messages will you come across? What new powers might you embrace?
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