The unconscious & art — how I think it influences my creation
Tags: Nft, Flowers, Cryptoart, Nftartist, Nft Marketplace

The unconscious & art — how I think it influences my creation nanda Jul 6·7 min read

It was Saturday night, I lay down to sleep and closed my eyes to think… what could I say about myself and my art? So I kept asking myself this question. Almost asleep, some ideas came to me. I thought, okay they are interesting, I will remember them tomorrow. But noooo! I can’t leave this job to my brain, sometimes I can’t remember in detail what I was thinking at that moment between being awake or asleep.

I got up and grabbed my cell phone to write it down. I quickly started to write, so as not to let the idea slip away. My boyfriend said: what are you doing? I answered: an idea for the blog! He grumbled: now? Leave it alone and go to sleep, you are not going to write your blog now, are you? I said no, I won’t. But ok, I could have done it if I wanted to. It was 1 a.m, I went back to sleep.

Today, it has been a few days since that. I have already warmed up my coffee and I am here in the morning writing.

I believe that our unconscious has a huge power over what we do, including art. This daydreaming I do before going to sleep — yes, I use it often for new ideas — is just a chat with my unconscious. I believe it has all the wonderful ideas I need to have, it has information about me that I can’t even imagine. Pleasure, unconscious. My conscious may be formulating the sentences, organizing the ideas, but my unconscious is sending signals — maybe intuitive — telling me when to stop or to continue what I am doing.

On this subject of the unconscious — I am no expert on this — just a curious scholar in my spare time. I started reading Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. That topic, and perhaps my openness to it, led me to many other places. Somehow, I got to the Tarot. But before that, I want to talk about the flower archetype.

If you are not familiar with the term unconscious/subconscious or as Carl Jung put it, the collective unconscious, I will tell you about it briefly.

Archetypes are primordial images, meaning that these images exist before we ourselves. They are inherited from our ancestors. It’s funny when you think of something, for example a lemon, you will see the image of it. Our brain creates images. Some of these images can be called archetypes.

If you see an eagle and think about the image it conveys to us unconsciously, that will be the archetype — the message — that the eagle communicates to our brain. We can observe its behavior — I have watched some documentaries for this — it is a strong and powerful animal. Being in contact with these images creates dopamine in our brain and connects us to our spiritual side.

It is the strength of the symbolism that it brings that makes it an archetype. They are messages that our conscious does not pick up and open the door to our unconscious, becoming behaviors, ways of thinking, etc. Becoming our reality! That’s why we have to be very careful, because it is very difficult to control these ideas that go into our unconscious without us realizing it, because they usually come from other people like our family, culture, politics…

This applies to many things in our life, we can see archetypes being used daily in commercials or to control a nation. But I told you this in a simple and shallow way about the subject.

Just to say that at this moment I am working with the archetype of flowers. I got my first tattoo when I was 18, a lotus flower on my back, a little bit lower… (I should put a picture?) I got this tattoo first because I wanted one (a youth thing) and second because it represents for me all the stages I needed to go through to get to that moment.

I had left the child Fernanda and was going towards the adult Fernanda and these two people couldn’t have the same behavior, ideas and wishes. Honestly, I even forget that I have this tattoo. If it were today, I wouldn’t have done it (laughs).

The lotus flower is very interesting, it is an aquatic plant that has its roots deep in the mud. The flower opens at sunrise. Its symbolism is in spiritual and mental purity. In being born out of mud. Bringing beauty out of difficulties, in the absence of beauty put beauty, out of our own inner mud — for me. If you look it up you will see that it has importance in many cultures. But I won’t go into it.

The archetype of flowers in general is beauty. Who looks at a flower and cannot see its beauty? But where is the beauty? How do we explain beauty to someone? If it is not something internal to the person, coming from his or her unconscious? The flower is feminine, it is love, purity, spiritual perfection, harmony, youth, the life cycle?

What effect does the flower have on you? What message do you receive from it in your body, mind and spirit? That is the archetype. That is why, for me, it is so magical to work with flowers. Because I wish that they have this positive message about other people. I wish, that the people who come in contact with my art can feel this.

The symbolism of flowers is not only in “being a flower” but also in their color. Each color has an action in our brain, for example red, usually associated with passion, is a color of action, strength, masculinity, excitement and also has its opposite side, which can be seen as “negative” which is aggressiveness, anger… Yes, I also like to study about colors!

If you think about it, there are many colors, right? Each one combined in a way and amount, will bring an effect on us in the long run. Blue is my favorite color, it is the immensity of the sky, space, tranquility and calm, but in its “negative” aspect it can be sadness.

All this led me to the Tarot. Since I started to use this tool for self-knowledge, it helped me to go through situations where my conscious doesn’t see a clear way out. I use the cards to “access” messages from my unconscious. It is interesting to say, that my art is very connected to the archetypal energy of the Empress.

an amateur photo of the Empress

Don’t think of the cards only as divination/prediction of the future. But also as symbolism. The Empress is a feminine energy card, connected to nature, she is the mother, generator, she commands and rules. She is femininity with wisdom. She is creative, fire and energy.

This is what I am putting into my art, at least what I consciously think I am doing. I am putting me — a little redundant — but I am putting the Fernanda I know myself and an unconscious Fernanda, which I don’t know so well.

When I open myself up to create, I leave a door open, so that the more creative and unconscious Fernanda can appear — because I trust that she has much more information and creativity for that. The conscious Fernanda is necessary for the technical part, she is also very important because she keeps all her knowledge. Maybe one doesn’t exist without the other, both are necessary in different moments.

In everything I am doing, there is also the Fernanda from the past, with her experiences and her whole life that is being put into an art. Along with that, there is the new Fernanda that is emerging every day.

Thinking about it now, there seems to be so much involved in this art that I couldn’t even imagine… But I am happy to share this. Was all this confusing? I am good at rambling. In short, if you have followed me this far — I appreciate it — I have talked about my unconscious in the arts, the influences that sometimes we don’t imagine but that happen!

I honestly don’t know how to wrap this up, there are countless things that could still be said. But everything has an end, at least for now. I have the Empress card open and when I see her face I can almost see my face in it. This is strange, but real. I hope to connect with her when I need the energy to create.

In closing, follow me on Twitter — on my linktree you can access other social networks.

* If there is any error in my writing or in my concordance, please forgive me. I am not fluent in the language but I still want to write to communicate about my art.