Each of these images portrays a half—forgotten memory, an archetypal memory which we tend to forget in our daily entanglements.
My work responds to a basic inner need of the human psyche; a need for the mysterious, the unreasonable, the unsolvable, even the fearful. My benign beasties are a way of satisfying this need with inwardly recognizable images. The viewer should experience these worlds but bring his own magic, while looking within himself, into my art.
When I create I am part of a more encompassing consciousness that flows through me in concurrent streams of meaning at great amperage. I ride the "galactic wave" through the "platonic cosmos" of my symbols and I am led to explore ideas beyond the grasp of reason. And the resultant art shows that product and process are one. At such times, I am in a creative trance and I let my hands take over. I say,“Hands, do your thing”, and I leave the creative act to the more encompassing consciousness, to the galaxy of creativity in which I am only one star. At these times a joy surges through me as when a child suddenly beholds a picnic on the grass.
I never worry or fret for inspiration for the next piece because "el duende", the creative daemon, always goads me on. I do not fear for lack of inspiration. I fear only the inability to get to my work. When I cannot work, the deamon buffets me. I feel that the devil is orchestrating the apocalypse.
All my works contain archetypal symbols leading to inner realities. There are so many symbols and realities that I do not know them all myself. I invite the viewer to discover them within himself with the help of my art. For example, my smokestacks are, among other things, symbols of the fire within, alchemical symbols signifying transformation, flux, change, growth, psychic transmutation, metamorphosis, such as: man into beast, or beast into beauty, or light beast into a dark lurking beast, from a bed of cowslip flowers into Titania, Queen of the Fairies, from man to ass, from the hunter into the hunted, man into deer, lover into unicorn, horned nymph into child.
Elsbeth Ramos (a.k.a. Elsbeth Foster)
October 26, 1977
I feel transported already!