Ron Dowd - Art / Psyche / Nonduality
Reflections on visual art, place, psychotherapy and nonduality
From the category archives:
Descending Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) on the New South Wales far south coast. This was on our February trip to Mystery Bay and around.
Short article on Gulaga.
From my poem blue boat on a stormy sea:
feeling the chill, descended
encountering things of a black shiny nature –wriggling leaches
that we knocked from our shoes
and a snake that turned its back
slipped away into cover
In February we spent ten days at Mystery Bay on the New South Wales far south coast. It’s a beautiful area and I found writing there very pleasurable. Here’s an evening image taken from the cottage we stayed in.
A poem that resulted:
the little ones
a flock of tight knots -
brown gerygones
drubbing on lathes of the decking
like rubber bullets ricochetinglittle fists of children
each vector of forces
arriving and then leaving
the verandah emptynot as it was
before they came
but changed, a stagewhereon the piece took place
and the little ones
moved on
And I find the image below a very hopeful one – approaching a rise on an open track, a soulful lifting and sense of space. The black cockatoos love this area, swaying in the banksias and strafing in flocks. Near the headland north of Mystery Bay, on the way to Corunna Lake.
In this article I related some art works I’d made to the Gestalt contact cycle and the modifications or disturbances of contact spoken about in Gestalt.
I described how these art works led me to wonder about various ideas of self in the Gestalt literature. I inquired about Gestalt field theory, and if and how it relates to the idea of a noumenal field, as I intuitively experienced this in relation to my art making practice.
I suggested how Gestalt phenomenological fields and the noumenal field may relate to each other, and that the idea of a noumenal field is a natural extension of Gestalt’s phenomenological field.
The article appeared in the Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand Vol 2 No 2 May 2006.
Download:
The article is available in Acrobat format.
Download the article (RonDowdGJArticle2006.pdf, 25 pages, 360Kb).
Ron Dowd is a psychotherapist practising in Sydney's East. He works from a Gestalt, intersubjective and nondual perspective. He's a member of GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand) and is PACFA registered. Ron also makes art, some of which appears here. You can contact him by email, phone or web-form.
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