"UNCONSCIOUS AWARENESS"
Imagining Possibilities Within and Beyond the Surfaces of Reality
By Alan D M Rayner
This set of pictures comes from a series painted over a span of more than 30 years based on personal reflections alongside my professional work as a biological scientist and ecologist. The paintings seek to look behind and beyond the explicit surfaces of earthly and universal features, to a ‘no thingness’ realm of creative space from which we are no more separable than are whirlpools in a water flow. All things, our Selves included, are dynamic inclusions of this space, which, far from coming between us, actually unites (‘intra-connects’) our insides through our outsides. But it is easy to lose sight of this space, particularly because it requires us to see something invisible, something implicit that we can only imagine. And when we do lose sight of it, choosing to focus only on explicit material things through our rationalistic desire to gain social, political, economic, psychological, scientific or technological control, we separate the inseparable. And then, with all possibility of relationship denied, the scene is set for abuse. No thing, no being, is isolated or independent from any other, but rather exists in a mutually transforming relationship of one with the other. Any thing we do to Other, we ultimately do to our Selves.
- Fiery Swan
- Out of the Shadows
- Willowy Bridge
- Nightfall
- Fishing in Hope
- Solsbury Hill
- Ibotenic Thread
- Tortuous Advance
- Vernal Illuminations
- Archangelic Channels
- Counter-Currents
- Ptear Drops
- View from Anchorage
- Engagement
"FIERY SWAN"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1970
Made after an idyll by a sea loch in the west of Scotland, this marks a kind of breakthrough when I found a style of oil painting that suited what I wanted to express in spite of, or perhaps because of, my technical limitations. It was also the first time that the swan emerged, both in dreams and in paintings, as a symbol of serene wandering and fiery self-assertion.
"OUT OF THE SHADOWS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1973
A golden eagle, symbolizing hope, emerges out of the shadows of an austere rock face to fly out over sea towards sunlight.
"WILLOWY BRIDGE"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1974
A rowing boat is guided along a channel, too narrow to dip its oars, between opposing cliffs of abusive aggression and serene obstinacy, symbolized by hawks and swans. The way out into the sunlit ocean is through a curtain of leaves trailing from the hair of two willowy female figures who bridge across the chasm between sides that, at base, are not so very unlike one another.
"NIGHTFALL"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1974
A female figure draws a net curtain of stormy darkness across a glittering daytime scene, irradiated by sunny terns and with flowers receptive to the wanderings of a butterfly and passing gannet.
"FISHING IN HOPE"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1975
Painted at a dark, self doubting time (I was completing my PhD!), this depicts the feeling of hope and reassurance that I once felt as a child watching a party of Italian fishermen, fishing in still water by means of light and net.
"SOLSBURY HILL"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, c. 1990
Painted for my daughter, Hazel, based on the scene she loved from her bedroom window of the ancient hill fort of Solsbury Hill, and drawing from the lines of the Peter Gabriel song about that hill, "an eagle flew out of the night".
"IBOTENIC THREAD"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1999
This painting illustrates the significance of the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, or, more specifically, ibotenic acid, the hallucinogenic compound that the mushroom contains, in human culture. The scale-shifting properties of the mushroom, said to have inspired Lewis Carroll's Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, are depicted as a spiralling red and white-spotted screw-thread (based on the mushroom cap) around a telescopic staff (based on the mushroom stem). The thread links a Heavenly sky containing rain clouds formed from the spore-bearing "basidia" of the fungus to a fiery Hell across an earthscape of mountains, forests, rivers, flood plains and sea. This thread symbolizes the Shamanic use of the fungus, and the endless union of masculine (straight) and female (curved) themes, to transcend higher and lower realms of consciousness.
"TORTUOUS ADVANCE"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 1999
The moss, Tortula muralis, with twist-topped spore-producing capsules and cushions of bristle-pointed leaves, bravely advances across an exposed boundary of constraining brickwork built both to shelter and to confine human beings, towards a distant green hill. The hill contains the self-same shape as the moss and is topped by a trinity of trees, two straight-trunked, the other forked, symbolizing the union of shadow and conscious selves.
"VERNAL ILLUMINATIONS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1999
Separate sexes of hazel and alder catkins, and hermaphrodite flowers of celandines, illuminate springtime emergence from winter darkness. The impenetrable, mirror surface of a lake of clear tear water contains both shadows and reflections but admits no insight within its straight-edged, arum-lined, and sinuous boundaries. Grief is fathomless, imponderable, but not without respite or hope cascading from the conciliation of polarities.
"ARCHANGELIC CHANNELS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 1999
A hermaphrodite Yellow Archangel Flower, cut in half to expose receptive channels of gynoecium and donating channels of androecium, flies and falls through universal space, creating and following channels of least resistance bounded by cascading Aurora.
"COUNTER-CURRENTS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 1999
A detached silver feather, blown by wind, and a fallen gold leaf web, caught in river currents, drift apart. But ducks, propelled by their self-possession of both wing feathers and feet webs, take to both air and water as they choose and so, within shifting limits, make their own ways. In these ways they create the fore and aft of a life-boat pattern, seen only from an imaginary perspective, that plies the surface of yet greater, more mysterious depths. So too might airy intellect and watery emotion be related when life’s dynamic context is fully filled.
"PTEAR DROPS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 2000
The boundaries of a conscious, bright-eyed awareness of pear blossom and fruit dissolve into a deeper world of pools, riven by disjunction where cascades descend, splash and refocus, caught in a frozen moment.
"VIEW FROM ANCHORAGE"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 2001
The clear perspective of explicit landscape features grounded within a fixed reference frame, is dwarfed by the implicit view taken in from encircling flights of Snow Goose imagination, where cloud-dappled sky becomes summitless, snow-patched mountainside, far beyond the peaks and troughs, light and shadow, of rational consciousness.
"ENGAGEMENT"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 2001
Painted in response to my daughter, Hazel's, announcement of her engagement to Rijk on September 7th 2001.
Beyond a curtain of fire and containing wall of earthy bricks is a vista through air and across water to a bejewelled eternity, a curved, inductive, inner space within a ring, a loving Zero. The ring is shared between swans, male and female reflections brought together, each at One with the Other. Imagining beyond confrontation. Rejoining polarities. Denying Neither. Embodying Both.