home
Since graduating from university with a degree in English literature, David Clark has, throughout his career, been a freeelancer working variously as potter, teacher, interior decorator/designer and poet, self-publishing a book of collaged poems entitled Stellations. In the 1980’s he trained in Transpersonal psychology in London with Barbara Somers and Ian Gordon-Brown and for the last 17 years has been studying the work, known as Process Work, of Arnold Mindell and colleagues. For 7 years, he was the UK coordinator of Process work and still organises the seminars of Arnold and Amy Mindell in London.
In 1887 the French painter Paul Gaugin painted one of his most celebrated paintings, whose title poses the questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? It is this title that prompted the interrogative headings for my website.
In a vision during a near-death experience C.G. Jung felt certain that he was on the verge of finding the answer to these same questions:
“I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would understand – this too was a certainty – what historical nexus my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come in to being and where my life was flowing.” (My italics)
He even described the house that he built for himself on Lake Zurich as the place ‘in which I could become what |I was, what I am and what I will be.’
In times of confusion, dis-orientation and bewilderment, many of us ask such questions.
In 1882 at the age of 34, Gaugin was a successful stockbroker who painted in his spare time. He lived in France with his Danish wife and five children and bought works from many emerging Impressionist artists of the time, such as Monet, Manet, Pissarro and Renoir. However in the financial crisis of that year the bank he worked for ran into difficulties and he found himself out of work. Two years later he moved with his wife and family to Copenhagen, but, after a year, he gave up his unsuccessful business career there, left his wife and family and moved back to France to paint full-time. Six years later, frustrated by lack of recognition and short on finances, he set off to Tahiti where he could live more cheaply and where he hoped to escape European civilisation. Apart from one return visit, he spent the remaining 12 years of his life on the French Polynesian islands. However, siding with the natives against the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church meant that he never fully escaped from European ‘civilisation’. The questions of his painting were born out of this radical shift in his personal identity and in the culture and environment in which he was living.
Contact details:
David Clark
Email: david@activityzero.com
Mobile: 07711 939 469