"In rage and despair I smudged the picture on to the canvas with no faith that anything reasonable would come out." The painter often stressed that this picture of a split man was in no sense a product of his conscious will. He had simply bowed to compulsion after four years of being haunted by that face in his dreams.

Peter's longtime analyst Marie-Louise von Frantz comments: "The eye on the left is opened in fearful vision, that on the right remains sceptical and cool."

This picture was Birkhäuser's breakthrough to so-called pictures of the imagination. In other words he began to put forms and images from the unconscious on canvas without any kind of model from external reality and free from slavish conscious control. The painter himself said about his imaginative pictures:

"I can't always bring it out at the first attempt, because it's difficult to keep in touch with the intuition that is guiding me. Then sometimes I find the right way of expression at once, or to put it more accurately: it reveals itself suddenly. Usually it is groping in the dark, fetching it out. From time to time I get myself on the wrong track without noticing it.

"Then a very critical dream may emerge, and I realise that I shall have to start all over again. It can drive one to despair. Then I try again and to my surprise the painting assumes a totally unexpected form. Usually the unconscious presents me with a new content or form or idea, it seems to ambush me. But then I have to find a way of putting it on canvas. To have the right attitude is a very serious problem; I'm glad I had the opportunity of discussing this with Jung."

Jung had said: "The dream provides the stimulus, but it is only a sketch, a cartoon; you have to develop it and give it form."

To which Birkhäuser had replied:"But I'm always afraid I'll distort the original notion too much. In transferring such a delicate insubstantial thing to canvas with thick oil colors it often tends to change. Additional ideas which were not in the original impulse begin to obtrude."

Jung answered "That doesn't matter, that too is part of the unconscious impulse."

SOURCE: Light from the Darkness: the Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser, (1980), pp.13-14, comments by Eva Wertenschlag & Kaspar Birkhäuser; Frantz's comment on the halves' different expressions, p.30; plate on p.31.

AFTERWORD

I agree with Peter it's hard to work with no models, purely from memory of a dream. But a flawed expression of a unique dream is better than one more nicely rendered shoe.

I also mistrust Jung here. A dream is just a half-baked cartoon the Conscious can fix up into something better? Funny how such "improvements" often end in New Age Jungian blather--visual or verbal generalities! I assume my dreaming brain is working hard, so I take its images and ideas seriously. I prefer the results--both esthetic, and real-life.

Tip o' the hat to Marie-Louise von Frantz for her close observation of the dream image, instead of drifting off into theory (as she does in describing some of Peter's paintings). I knew he was troubled, but only after she pointed out the moods of the clashing halves did I see them--by blocking half the face with a hand.

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