A similar motif but not as powerfully realized.Not as imaginative.Again,erotic image of a female.Scantily dressed girl,in this case with mouth slightly open in delight,self satisfaction or to speak?Again the rocking horse motif,but this time ridden by the girl not the girl as rocking horse;the ouroboras again framing the image of the girl on the rocking horse and the same pentagrams dancing within the various points in the image.
This painting represents the visual art of the English artist, magical theorist, writer and practicing magician Mark Dunn, at his best. The power of the painting emerges from the transformation of the erotic centre of the pattern of line and colour through conjunction between incongruous elements which focus the erotic but divert it from a merely sensuous value to something disturbing and difficult to define.
The painting is beautiful because of the harmony realized through its elements, discordant as these are taken individually. The smooth skin and lovely face of the woman lend the painting a sense of the delights of life contradicted by the cruel bit on the woman's mouth, framing her face in what looks like a lock, with a menacing looking club topping the facial structure. The sensuousness of her skin is reinforced by her erotic pose, a pose rendered incongruous since the legs metamorphose into the body of a decorated rocking horse. Questions spring to mind. What kind of fantastic creature is being suggested here? A creature or a state of mind or of being? The presence of the child, sitting with such princely ease atop this fantastic form while holding a riding crop in his small hand, amplifies the pattern of incongruities that constitute this painting, while embodying its surreal power.
Directly below the bizarre central tableau is a snail or sea shell, its curve engraved with Roman numerals in the sequence of a clock, pierced at the centre of its spiral form by the downward tip of one of the triangles of a pentagram, itself inscribed with unusual letters. Could the spiral form, in alignment with the image of the shell clock, complicated by the integration with the pentagram, suggest anything about patterns? The motif of patterning unifies spiral, clock and pentagram. The spiral evokes abstract pattern, the snail, biological pattern, the clock, temporal pattern and the pentagram inscribed with letters suggests the integration of consciousness and symbolism aspired to through the use of patterns in magic.
Particularly unsettling is the image of the unborn child as it looks in the womb, on the extreme left, directly below the woman. The delicate limbs, tender toes and large head of this image of a human being in terms of its appearance in the first environment in which human life emerges evokes the womb and,by implication, sources of life. Its presence outside the womb suggests danger for the growing life and makes the unborn child less like a beautiful form than a deeply disturbing, almost nightmarish figure on account of its yanking out of its nurturing context in the womb outside which its survival is delicate. This hint of nightmare is amplified by the turbulence of disjointed forms emerging from the maelstrom behind the central figures of the painting.
The background,at the back of the space where the boy and his mount are positioned seems to be a maelstrom from which images are forming with turbulent energy.
This maelstrom is centered in the massive image of an ouroboros, a snake coiled up in a circle.
The evocation of nightmare by the image of the unborn child, reinforced by the disturbing fate of the woman, is rendered tolerable by the colour that suffuses the entire painting, giving it an overlay of calm beauty through carefully modulated tones and patterns of light without dispelling the discordance that constitutes the painting; a discordance represented by faces disjointed from bodies; faces arrested in moments of reflection, as the boy’s face next to the foetus, or a face with lips parted in speech, as the woman at the top right; faces simply looking, as the eye on the top left; a face pensive as the little girl whose head is visible next to the gazing eye; discordances unified by the image of the snake whose coils shape the centre of the painting, the entire length of its triple coils inscribed with strange designs that suggest an unusual hieroglyph, its mouth open in a visual form that adds a sense of power to the dynamism of its coiling shape; a unity focused ultimately in the most weird tableau of the nubile naked woman horse and her strange rider.
The sense of mystery evoked by the bizarre universe created by the painting is amplified by the fact that it is pervaded with abstract forms that suggest a language removed from conventional communication, such as the form directly behind the rump of the rocking horse. The form glows with a dull blue light as it is suffused by a grey haze. It is constructed of a sequence of three crosses of which the central one is capped by the line that forms the top of the rectangle that encases the crosses, the rectangular top shaping into triangles and circles, as the right side of the form extrudes into two soaring arabesques that flank a central ornate pillar formed of a base of three lines that soar out of the left and right to surround a small half circle.
The effect is dramatic and mysterious.
The unborn child does suggest life in the most potent form known to human beings while the clock evokes the passing of time. What may the biological patterns of the snail like spiral suggest in relation to the biology evoked by the unborn child, still waiting in the womb of time to emerge?
The uoroboros suggests the possibility of alignment of the primal creativity of life evoked by the unborn child with conceptions of natural and cosmic form suggested by the ancient symbol of the coiled snake.
The lines that come most readily to my mind in connection with this bizarre beauty are W.B.Yeats phantasmagoria:
“…twenty centuries of stony sleep …vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, …what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
“All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”
It is tempting to explain these motifs in Mark Dunn's art, but I will not. Explaining meanings of a work of art might help to destroy its mystery, leading the person explaining and the person being explained to to conclude, wrongly, that they have understood, have grasped that work. It is ultimately more effective to let the work of art reveal itself or to the experiencer and the work of art collaborate in its revelation or recreation in the experiencer's consciousness.
To that effect,I shall say nothing more for the time being about this painting and move on to other Mark Dunn works.
To create a bridge that will take us into the universe he has created, let us enter into a verbal analogue by Dunn to the surreality of this painting:
Around the Circle the Masks within Masks speak a Rune leading to a Rune to yet another Rune along the endless Rune etched scales of the Serpent Dragon Circled Ouroboros, at whose midst the Unknowable one of all potential who rides a Spider of an Eight-Legged Horse weaving Webs of Associations myriad to Glide over.
Seated upon a Cubic stone of measured Space-Time whose Light be fixed be but one of many a stone throne, all as one simultaneous to ride as an Eight-Legged Mare, which be tethered to a Tetrahedron World-Tree at the midst of the Cube enclosed by a Dodecahedron.
Many a Dodecahedron Universe to Seer while to ride the Eight-Legged Mare at whose centre be one’s inner Star of a Sun behind the Sun of Singular Eye whose Light travelled faster at the Ending of a Beginning, Beginning of an End leading to yet another Beginning Ouroboros, Travelling without Moving...
Two Dimensional of Mandala pylon Two Horses becomes Three Dimensionsal to envisage of Spider weaving webbed fusion leading to a Cube, to thereby Glide into a World Tree of Nine Dimensions...
An Association of Gliding Imagination leads one to a Cube of a 'Tardis' to go further still of Multiverse Associations, for the one whom rides the Cube is Unknowable of many Masks... Grimnir...
What I find delightful here is its mantic form, the chant created through repetition and accentuated through the idiosyncratic use of capitalisation; an imagination of mythic proportions; the manner in which it piles images upon images, one strange image after another; provoking the mind to try to assemble the jigsaw of images in order to arrive at some coherence out of a form similar to S.T.Coleridge’s description of watching the English actor Edmund Kean’s acting as being like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
The incantatory rhythm, the sacerdotal atmosphere generated through the diction and structure of the passage suggest that a journey of some sort is taking place, a journey not so much in time and space as in consciousness, a journey that is operating in relation to the rhythmic progression of the passage, a rhythm that evokes the idea of ‘“travelling without moving” by riding a“ Spider of an Eight-Legged Horse” which is also a “Cubic stone of measured Space-Time “, while the “Eight-Legged Mare” is described as “tethered to a Tetrahedron World-Tree at the midst of the Cube enclosed by a Dodecahedron”.
This incantatory rhythm/flow suggests the rhythm of Mark Dunn’s technique of expansion of consciousness through which he describes himself as ‘travelling without moving’ by entering into other dimensions through the effects of attuning his consciousness withthe being of non physical entities through the act of chanting a sound that resonates with the nature of these beings ,something like a name, while meditating on visual symbol associated with them. Within that context, the mind becomes for Dunn the eight legged horse of Odin,the Norse god who used that horse in travelling between the various worlds constituted by Yggdrasil,the World Tree/the tree of life which constitutes through its branches the various worlds and dimensions in the cosmos, while at its roots were Mimer, the well of wisdom and the three sisters who weave the fates of humans. The ideational rhythm between the interdimensionality of the tree, the subject of relationships between the course of a human life in terms of the existence of various possibilities available to one in relation to the coexistence of multiple realities and the quest for access to sources of wisdom to enable one traverse these dimensions is at the core of Dunn’s thought and visual and verbal imaginative world.
The image of a ‘Cubic stone of measured Space-Time’ is particularly impressive because it sums up most powerfully the unity of space and time, a motif central to Dunn’s work, evoking as it does the history of human engagement with these fundamental constituents of material and mental existence. The cube represents spatio-temporal coordinates in which the meeting of the lines that make up its four sides suggest, in an abstraction from actual experience that is yet ideationally vivid, the fact that motion in space implies temporal activity or moving through time, and that time and space are interrelated through the revolutions of the celestial bodies, as well as the changes undergone by spatial forms in the context of time. The cube, therefore, can be seen as made up of lines in which each line represents either time or space and the constitution of the right angles of the cube by the meeting of two lines evokes the constitution of material existence by these immaterial forms and the effects of that on human consciousness.
The “Spider of an Eight-Legged Horse weaving Webs of Associations myriad”,the Spider weaving webbed fusion leading to a Cube, to thereby Glide into a World Tree of Nine Dimensions...”
which the rider ,the “Unknowable one of all potential” the “one whom rides the Cube is Unknowable of many Masks... Grimnir...” whose activity is further evoked in terms of “Many a Dodecahedron Universe to Seer while to ride the Eight-Legged Mare at whose centre be one’s inner Star of a Sun behind the Sun of Singular Eye whose Light travelled faster at the Ending of a Beginning, Beginning of an End leading to yet another Beginning Ouroboros, Travelling without Moving...”
