Real Poetic Magic – Interview with Jim Harter

Dec 1, 2011 Jim Harter and Daniel Mirante in Interviews 1 Comment Tags: Collage, psychedelic

Monadic Consciousness by Jim Harter

Thanks for talking with us Jim. To get the ball rolling, when did you begin playing with images and what power do you think images hold?

In 1967 I had taken a hiatus from college and was driving a long distance moving van. When I unloaded a shipment in San Jose, I parked my rig and took a bus into San Francisco. Having heard of Haight-Ashbury, I took a cab there and quickly saw posters for musical concerts. The imagery in best of these had an archetypal quality and were like an alarm clock for me, waking me up from a state of relative unconsciousness. I bought some of these then, and also on a later trip that summer. I returned to college in September and began trying to design my own posters. So I would say it was then that I first started playing with images and first realized their power. And in regard to your question, somehow archetypal images speak to a deeper part of us, the more beautiful and idealistic part of us. In some way they awaken this within us.

Journey to the Heart by Jim Harter

Wow, so this was really the height of the 1960s psychedelic revolution. What connection does your image making have with the other breakthroughs of those times, such as psychedelic rock and the explosion of awareness in psychedelic substances?

While I was familiar with the pre-psychedelic rock that was popular in 1966-7, my initiation into the psychedelic culture that day in San Francisco included attending a concert that featured Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother & the Holding Company. This was my first exposure to extended rock pieces and light shows that were mesmerizing and trance inducing. I had what they call a “contact high” that night. It was truly what Richard Tarnas might call a Promethean and Dionysian experience. I first experimented with marijuana and LSD the following year and this awakened me to the potential of entheogens for stimulating one’s own inner imagery. A mescaline experience in 1971 took me to what some call “I AM” consciousness. From then on my art became more mystical.

Lovers Dream Journey by Jim Harter

The deep heart and clarity in the work is very strong. Have you had any prophetic experiences with your work, or experiences whereby personal meanings or events symbolised in the work actually manifest later on?

Only one instance immediately comes to mind. In 1984, while living in New York, I arranged to learn the mische technique from Carlos Madrid. I did a sketch for my first painting “Lovers Dream Journey.” At this time I had just learned of Jungian picture analysis and took a Saturday workshop from a Jungian analyst. I took along the sketch to show him. While he thought the image had beauty, he also found it disturbing for two reasons. In this picture the movement is going towards the left, which the Jungians consider a movement from consciousness towards unconsciousness. Secondly the flying image of merged couples with eagle heads and foetus was ungrounded. I wonder if all flying images are seen this way. As this sketch was on tracing paper, I switched sides to see how it would look with the movement to the right, but didn’t like it. Thus I painted it as I originally sketched it. About a year after I made the sketch, my girl friend became pregnant. We were not in a good financial situation so I persuaded her to get an abortion, something I have never been very proud of. We soon broke up and I have largely lived a solitary life since. I have always wondered if the outcome would have been different had I painted the picture differently.

Mythic Sea by Jim Harter

How do things manifest for you with the art? Are they primarily based on dream, vision, intentional engineering of composition or spontaneous surprises? What do you feel facilitates your own creativity?

First of all, to facilitate one’s creativity, the most important thing is to have an expanded mind. Not just from drug experiences, but from a deep exposure to the world of art, and an ever growing acquaintance with metaphysical ideas. The goal for any visionary artist should be to access what is deep and timeless within him/herself. If we do this then that vision that emerges will express itself through our individual uniqueness. We all begin slowly. Besides experimenting with drugs, I also read all kinds of books that were very stimulating in helping me awaken to a much greater set of realities. I read Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Carlos Castaneda, Hermann Hesse, channeled material from Jane Roberts and others, Robert Graves, Carl Jung, James Hillman, Yogananda, Daniel Andreev, and more recently Richard Tarnas. I made friends with a few psychics and learned something of the way they see things. Over the years I also connected with spiritual teachers and did spiritual workshops. This opened me up inwardly and provided me with many frames of reference.

When I first started doing art, I learned that marijuana was useful for stimulating surreal visual imagery in one’s mind. This was my first exposure to the power of the human psyche. I would jot down quick sketches of images that seemed to have substance. However once the drug effects wore off, these sketches didn’t always hold up. I began working in the collage medium in 1972. Working this way offered a different way of accessing the psyche, providing a multiple choice way of combining images, and freed me from the necessity of using drugs. I would combine different images in various ways in an attempt to find something that “worked.” Over time I gained a deeper understanding of symbols and became familiar with those that had real meaning and authenticity for me.

The Witness by Jim Harter

The combination of symbols expresses ideas. They help to define each other and make a larger statement. They offer the potential of creating an art laden with rich and substantive meaning. However this potential is contingent on the progress that one makes in their own spiritual development. I think in this respect I am still a novice. But my cut and paste collage creations were not quick juxtapositions of incongruous imagery, but rather painstaking efforts that sought a real poetic magic, something that mirrored my own soul.

I would say it is the same for my paintings. Some of these were inspired by collages. Others with the intent of expressing some metaphysical idea, where the vision slowly materialized as the painting progressed. More recently I have begun paintings by creating interesting textures, and then seeing what images these might conjure. I don’t recall that dreams have ever inspired any of my art creations, nor has intentional engineering ever worked..

Jim Harter’s Artist Statement

My entry into the world of art came in 1967 via an exposure to San Francisco’s psychedelic poster art. This led me to take part in the Austin poster scene from 1969-72. Experimentation with psychedelics awakened me to the immense power of the human psyche in its ability to generate fantastic visual imagery, as it were, on an internal movie screen. From this I gained a better understanding of the fuel that was generating both the psychedelic art movement, and in Europe, the movement known today as Fantastic Realism. I also learned that a few of these artists had the gift of accessing higher creative states without drugs.

I soon found a way to access my own creative inspiration. The connection came to me while experimenting with collage and this has provided a lifelong interest. An early inspiration was the book Cosmic Bicycle by San Francisco collage artist Wilfried Satty. Satty used black and white Victorian era engravings as source material in a way that created an effect both mysterious and timeless. In that sense he broke from his collage predecessor Max Ernst, who seemed primarily interested in creating shocking, or merely strange surreal images. Satty’s art evoked something I was familiar with from drug experiences, and I wanted to infuse this into my own creations.

Working in the medium of collage has offered multiple choices. I would combine different images in various ways in an attempt to find something that “worked.” This allowed me to become familiar with those symbols that had real meaning and authenticity for me. So my cut and paste collage creations were not quick juxtapositions of incongruous imagery, but rather painstaking efforts that sought a real poetic magic, something that mirrored my own soul.

The combination of images expresses ideas. Modern depth psychology has suggested, however, that symbols are not fixed, but rather have multiple meanings and are open to various interpretations. The Dutch visionary painter Johfra has suggested that symbolic art “is like a mirror that, while remaining itself, constantly displays different images, depending on the person who looks in it.” Symbols combined together help to define each other and make a larger statement. They offer the potential of creating an art laden with rich and substantive meaning, capable of communicating very profound ideas.

All through the 1970s and later, I familiarized myself with the history of art as it involved the mythic, symbolic, and surreal. This was not only a search for inspiration, but also a study of how other artists expressed ideas and worked with symbols. Among my favorite artists are the Symbolists Gustave Moreau and Jean Delville; Surrealists Remedios Varo, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dali; and Fantastic Realist/Visionary painters Johfra, Ernst Fuchs, Alex Grey, and Ingo Swann. Concurrent with this effort was a study of philosophy, both Eastern and Western.

In the 1980s I became interested in painting. By then I had learned the limitations of my style of collage. I wanted to take my expression into colors and explore imagery for which I had inadequate source material. In 1981 I spent time in France with Dr. Jean Letschert, a Belgian artist and former student of Rene Magritte. He had gained a reputation in India as a respected yogi, and in his art blended a surreal style with mythic symbolism influenced by a deep understanding of Eastern and Western philosophical ideas and the depth psychology of Carl Jung. I also met members of a Dutch group of Fantastic Realist/Visionary artists known as the Metarealists. On my return to New York I met former students of Ernst Fuchs, a founding member of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. From one, Carlos Madrid, I learned the old master technique as taught by Fuchs.

My paintings have explored some of the same symbolic themes I began and continue to do as a collage artist. In the past two years I have learned to digitally colorize these collages, so I have been reworking some of the best. My color choices in this series often reflect my early love of psychedelic art. Generally speaking, my images are an attempt to tap into an archetypal reality, one that to my mind seems both timeless and deeply human. Thus I feel less like I am part of some modern trend but rather I am one following a well-trodden and ancient path, a path known not only to artists, but poets and others who have tried to express what is ultimately mysterious and ineffable. My mentor, Dr. Jean Letschert, coined a phrase for it, he called it being “a monk in the order of the marvelous.”