Today's Artifact

Gargoyle/Wall of Saint Salvatores/St. Andrews, UK

Symbols

"Armida" Symbol of Man/ 18" x 24"

While flying through the web today, searching for artists who might have interest in submitting work to EXPO, I landed upon a book (a shiny artifact..) that we used back at Smith College in our psych courses, whereupon I trod down to the basement to reclaim it..

Carl Jung's book "Man and His Symbols" is a salient source of information regarding the nature of art, its relevance to the deeper aspects of our lives and its significance at the heart of many sentiments of the more primitive kind.. Art has been playing at the edges of man's communication since there were fires to sit around and discuss what "the meaning of art" was.. Jung reminds us that as a society, our hopes, needs, aspirations have remained relatively constant through out the ages, and that while the arts/symbols may have transcended from one age to another, their truth and value have clearly continued to dazzle the psyche of culture.
"The history of symbolism shows that everything can assume symbolic significance: natural objects (like stones, plants, animals , men , mountains and valleys, sun and moon, wind, water and fire,) or man-made things (like houses , boats or cars,) or even abstract forms (like numbers or the triangle, the square and the circle) In fact, the whole cosmos is a potential symbol."

Carl Jung

"Man and His Symbols"