"Marking the 300th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, my vertical triptych painting ‘Swift, a Turn to the Unconscious’, oil and gold leaf on panel, focuses on an inward journey, as a type of ascension rooted in sacrifice, of the protagonist, painted as one of my ‘Moods’ after myself, the artist. 

Swift the artist, as Gulliver in the book, (Lemuel Gulliver was the pseudonym of the writer when the book titled, ‘Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts’, was first published, and later it was named Gulliver’s Travels), goes through massive transformations during his four journeys.

I took the oceanic environs of the journeys as the theatre of the unconscious that provides the background to everything that takes place through the four parts of the book. And because the unconscious became conscious of itself as being the unconscious only in the twentieth century, I projected a so-called modern soul onto the strata of Swift’s writing by painting myself there in the middle of that ocean. 

Gulliver is imprisoned by petty dwarf conniving politics in Lilliput kingdom, then he is utterly humiliated by becoming a dwarf pet toy under the care of a child giantess, and then he has to tolerate the ridiculous over-intellectualised logic of the scientists of Laputa whose knowledge is severed from real life experiences and practices just like their island is disconnected from the surface of the earth. Eventually in the land of the sublime horse-like creatures the Houyhnhnms he realizes that he is no more than a sophisticated brute, one of those human-like Yahoos he despises and abhors. Finally, as he is back in England, he is unable to tolerate the presence of humans who resemble those Yahoos and he can only be in a stable in the company of horses with whom he communicates. 

My painting focuses on the beginning of Gulliver’s travels and on the end where my ‘alter ego’ of my projected higher self onto the animistic sublime purity is the fish or the shark instead of Swift’s horses, and all that happens in between is expressed through many insights and realisations done by my stream of consciousness style of writing in the surfaces of the oil paint in the oceanic body over gold leaf. 

The bleak or claustrophobic outlook on life in the book is resembled by the condition of the artist in my painting sprawled in a horizontal crucified position and fastened by little Lilliput-like demons to the bottom of the ocean, aware that these resemble his own inward restrictions and limitations, the artist knows that the cross like ladder is also a way upwards towards the light or enlightenment above where the giant shark is. 

The shark in spite of its frightening presence is a resemblance of a sublime purity similar to the unfathomable purity of the Houyhnhnms horses of Gulliver’s last journey but here in order to come into his own true sublime nature the Yahoo-like artist has to study and understand the true nature of the prehistorical fish that contains the yet unknown data of life on earth. In my painting the Swiftian bleakness is redeemable through the vertical journey of understanding, this ascension inevitably includes sacrifices until the artist’s tightly held falsehoods evaporate and disappear. In the concrete reality of my life as a painter and printmaker this happens through the ongoing daily work of my practice. 

My intaglio textural expressions come to the fore in this painting in the form of these scratch marks continuous writing in paint that reveal the gold leaf beneath. In this writing I express many ideas and connotations inspired by the writing of Jonathan swift. For example, I go into a comparison dear to my heart with the philosopher-artist Friedrich Nietzsche who was believed to heartily embrace a horse that had been cruelly beaten by a human, he talked to the horse with great compassion, and then his mind collapsed. Swift suggests such mythical end to his life embracing horses and rejecting the unbearable vices of human Yahoos. As I write to my heart’s content inside the painting I elaborate on this and also on other insights about the true lives of fish, and what is the great animistic ‘alter ego’ of an artist, his or her way of shapeshifting to become a certain animal, in a parallel mirror-like life, perhaps not dissimilar to the way Freud, Lacan and other thinkers, who used the unconscious as a viable arena of purification and redemption, could or would have seen it. 

Swift’s Houyhnhnms Horse-like immaculate creatures communicate by a certain language vocally using words while my fish communicate silently by deep gazes with their eyes and expression of faces, the depiction of which is suitable for a painter and printmaker. 

This composition came up in my imagination almost in its entirety as soon as I heard of the project and I remember that the position of the artist as Christ on the cross was very important to me. The viewer can see in her or his way whatever is in this painting and my explanation is the way I see it. Constructing a visual composition after a voluminous text is a matter of instinct, the painting should feel good and make sense visually, and what I say about it afterwards is an effort to explain, if only to myself, the inward logic of the vision, while not disturbing the visual-textural plot."

Daniel Lipstein