The Black Sun has belonged to a deeper current in my life and artwork for many years. Taking Stanton Marlan’s The Black Sun as a point of departure, this essay explores alchemy, lumen naturae, darkness, imagination and the changing presence of these ideas within my landscape paintings.

There are certain ideas that seem to sit just beneath the surface of modern life, recognised in fragments, but rarely given their full significance. Imagination is one of them. In Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, Gary Lachman explores how imagination has been misunderstood, marginalised, and often reduced to something trivial or unreal within Western culture. What emerges instead is a very different picture. One in which imagination is not a secondary function of the mind,

Carl Jung’s reflections from Bollingen suggest a psyche extending beyond the bounded individual into nature, ancestry and a wider field of life. nature, ancestry, and the deep roots of life. This expanded post explores Jung’s vision of the interconnectedness of self, soul, and the living world.

The first encounter I discovered the work of Carl Jung during my mid-to-late teens, when I plucked this text from a shelf in a local bookshop. Having no idea at the time who this man was, or much about psychoanalysis, I imagine I was attracted by the title. The passages I encountered then stayed with me, and years later, when I began training and working as a psychotherapist, they returned with a very different significance. A timely passage in a culture of speed I find the f