How it strikes a lesson
The dream does in fact concern itself with both health and sickness, and since, by virtue of its source in the unconscious, it draws upon a wealth of subliminal perceptions, it can sometimes produce things that are very well worth knowing.[i] – Carl G. Jung, On the Nature of Dreams.
If we are to assimilate anything from Carl G. Jung’s hypothesis On the Nature of Dreams–or the long line of distinguished conversation on the subject–is that the potential to unpick it is as vast as it is endless.[ii] That is to say, ‘illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades.’[iii] The peculiar nature of the dream not only floods us with a view of the infinite but tugs us down to another life, a dream world. Down the rabbit hole we go. Suddenly you find yourself surrounded, visions come to in waves, swilling around you: either sinking or swimming, you are emersed.
Plunging us back into her ecosphere of the magnificent and the dissociating, Prudence Flint, hinges upon and returns to one of her many subjects; the psyche. Working from model-sittings and memory, Flint’s meticulously and beautifully rendered oil paintings are composed by drawing basic shapes on linen; erasing marks and formulating spaces for bodies to emerge, distort and project, until the painting and the implied interior begins to present itself. Soft, supple and subdued as her pastel-worlds can initially appear, they speak to something ‘other’. But what that other is or what it implies, is open to the viewer’s subconscious reading.
Plausibly we can envisage how Flint follows the “necessary blindless and covering up that is intrinsic to the process of painting,”[iv] however, we are relatively left in the dark as to whether these paintings are mere dreams or associations. And are they of Flint’s, or are they of yours, or rather, are they purely constructed fictions to punctuate Flint’s mise-en-scène and to tease out parables (personal and impersonal) to work-through. All are true, but how to choose correctly? The most evident answer is this: the paintings, to me, have remembered, repeated and worked-through[v] to something else. Gone are the days of the warm colour palette, fluffy mohair cardigans or tactile lime-green socks under leather sandals. There has been a shift. The clocks have changed, the daylight is dying, and night is looming.
The painting, Witch Hunt, becomes the perfect exempla: Flint’s female protagonist appears stilled on all fours in the dead of night. Crawling on the flattened grey floor, her flesh now rounded by hues of green and crimson, her ankles and wrists diminished in scale, so that the focal point, the natural gaze, hits the top of her left exaggerated thigh. She is perhaps quietly assimilating, imitating or metamorphosing into the feline stretched out behind her, the sole occupant of one of Flint’s characteristic ‘beds’; or on second thought, is this mysterious figure trying to silently escape the hunt, of which the painting’s title implies.
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