ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My older sister took me under her wing when I was twelve and introduced me to drawing and painting. We drew medieval cloisters and men on railroad tracks under a rainbow sky. I still have the pungent smell of cobalt blue paint in my nostrils decades later. She was my anima, my first guide who led me to see in art a road to the oneness, truth, beauty, and love that is Being.
Over the years, my art has developed, and seeks to embody, in a surreal way, archetypal forms and contents from the collective unconscious as they emerge and manifest themselves to my conscious mind. There is a collaboration between my consciousness, my unconscious, and the energies found in the synchronicities of a wiggling pen on paper, or paintings that either parallel that spontaneity, or whose forms are derived from details of these drawings. My interest in the thought of Carl Jung and my art practice existed side by side for a long time, but recently, they have come together in a very dynamic way. For the viewer, I extend an invitation to find recognizable, naturalistic forms in the complex semi-randomness of my works. In this way, my works are rather like Rorschach tests, a lively interplay between the work and the viewer’s psyche. These works thus act as analogues for the symbolic presentation of archetypes to human consciousness as they emerge from the hidden regions of our psyche, and even beyond the psyche, beyond time and space. This interplay is a quest for an answer to the question: How do you make the invisible visible? My work generally is always a work in progress, as there is finitude in nothing, infinity in everything.

Kevin McCaffrey