Shifting Dialogues

The article focuses on landscape impressions as a catalyst to start inner progress and creative innovation. The author uses the presumption that a work of art can act as an intermediary and testimony of specific states of mind. Two painters are presented, one contemporary and one from the turn of the last century. The difficulties in describing the origin of a painting and its coming into existence is considered and discussed. The object in view of the article is to point to the practicability of some aspects of psychoanalytical theories in the descriptions of the artistic creative process, of the relation viewer and work of art, of the studio dialogues between artist and viewer in front of the works. Objects relations theory, WR Bion's concepts of reverie, binocular viewing and negative capability, A Ehrenzweig's description of the different stages of the creative process, his positive accentuation of the role of the unconscious, the alternation between dedifferentiation and differentiation and need for the artist to go beyond the known, to be able to loose control of the work and let the painting 'live its life' is central. Art gives its own poetic imprints, not always accessible in words.