Artist and psychotherapist Marcus Price has exhibited at the Mick Jagger Centre, Tunbridge Wells and Senate House. In 2020, he published an anthology of poems and paintings, Asleep on the Volcano.

Marcus is currently showing his new exhibition Captivity and Freedom at the Tavistock Centre in London. At the private view last week, I asked him about the stories behind some of his artworks.

A Beam of Intense Darkness

It pictures a Norwegian group analyst I saw in an online group. I’ve met him in person a few times, then sketched his face and turned it into a painting. There are two other characters here, a bit obscure, but I’m not sure who they are.

The title is a reference to a term coined by Wilfred Bion. I feel that the picture of three figures might represent something very dark, for example the three witches in Macbeth.

A Beam of Intense Darkness (left)

Capturing Fire

It’s clearly a woman, and I don’t like to say who she is. She appeared abstractly like pretty much all my paintings. What also appears is this face in the smoke, as if in a mirror. She’s kind of seeing herself appear behind the fire, some kind of lonely communion going on.

This painting was in my consulting room for some time. It’s interesting how people responded. One person saw this as his mother protecting him from the heat, the fire of life, which I thought was a nice way to interpret it.

Capturing Fire (left) and Nothing to See Here (right)

Nothing to See Here

Quite a few of my paintings are done with an international group online, which has been running since the beginning of the pandemic. There are hundreds of people from all over the world associated with it. Many continents are represented. I’m in my garden shed, tuning in on my iPad, and people are talking and sharing their concerns. Often there are discussions about wars.

I realized that I’d drawn some kind of drone figure here, with its arms stretched out. There’s often this feeling, when someone is holds their arms out like that, that they’re trying to cover something up. Don’t look! Something that echoes down my personal life, as it does for many people. How much and what can we look at.

I remember, when I was four years old, a school friend being hit by a car and getting his head crushed, and my mother saying, ‘Don’t look!’. So, this picture somehow is epochal for my experiences. It’s a theme that comes up in different ways in my paintings. Something about us humans being turned into mechanical beings. Certainly within war.

Charlie Chaplin talked about the way humans are used for mad industrialism which is wrecking us and leading us off the cliff into complete destruction. It’s very, very important that we do look. I would like to think that I try to look.

Marcus with his guests at the private view

Ship of Fools

I was lucky enough to go to one of the lectures of psychoanalyst Salomon Resnik at the Institute of Group Analysis. He produced a book called Glacial Times which is all about his work with psychosis, and how psychotic people need to ‘melt’ because they become very ‘frozen’. That was his theory.

He drew on this poem by the 16th-century poet Sebastian Brant, about travellers in a boat going to Iceland, and they entered a mist and became paranoid and frightened. The poem cites their conversations in which they’re talking about imaginary beings coming out of the mist at them, until they go insane. It’s a very, very powerful poem.

Ship of Fools (right)

The Crucifixion

I think it’s the most interesting one because I keep getting drawn back to it. When I displayed it in Tunbridge Wells, somebody said to me they didn’t like it and that it’s awful. I said that one would hope so because it is the crucifixion. It obviously conveys something that’s awful, but also is an epoch for mankind.

I don’t think it’s Christ in the picture, it’s probably one of the robbers next to him. Christ is very difficult to see. It’s a comment on who commandeers Christianity and uses it for political aims, which I think is a very dangerous place to go.

Captivity and Freedom runs until 24 December 2025. Read more about Marcus Price on his website.