Page 3.
I was once caned in school for reading The Interpretation of Dreams. ( no big deal ) The book was considered to be highly immoral and subversive, and it's author Sigmund Freud, a corrupting influence. The incident only provoked further reading on the subject : Around the same time (1961) i started to chronicle my dreams and to make sketches of the most evocative images.
( Even today i dutifully record each dream upon waking .) Most of the drawings and paintings i display here are the inevitable outcome of these venturings into the subconscious realm.
I put together my first book of collages early 1964. Then after some years i moved from the books to works on large boards, then incorporating oil/mixed media . - For me the elements of collage : the discarded, the ephemeral, the torn and the broken, are valued in and for themselves. A good painting is like a meeting with an interesting stranger. Above all , it is to be lived and felt, not merely hung and studied. Initially, the books were compiled for reference purposes. The quotes and comments included here may serve as literary counterparts to the collages or be read as fragments of source material for many of the images and themes which have recurred
over the years . although the pages here are poorly photographed and require scanning and so forth , in order to be reproduced, i have tried to retain their spontaneous and casual character.

" Perhaps thought Goldmund, fear of death is at the root of all our image making, and perhaps too, of all our intellect.
We shrink from death, shuddering at our frail instability, sadly watching the flowers fade again and again.....................
......knowing in our hearts how soon we shall be as withered as they. So that when, as craftsmen we carve images, or seek laws to formulate our thoughts, we do it all to save what little we may, from the linked never-ending dance of death "
( Narziss and Goldmund : Herman Hesse )

" Deprived of external stimuli the mind not only falls asleep , it literally disintegrates. We are held together by external challenges and problems. Deprived of these, we drift apart....like a raft whose ropes have been cut " ( Times, 1981 )