I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like

Hear the fiery words of Alejandro Jodorowsky, mystic of image and prophet of vision: “I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It’s coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.” In these words he unveils the true source of creation—not the cold machinery of reason, but the hidden wells of the spirit. Art is not a calculation, nor is poetry a problem to be solved. Both rise like flames from the unconscious, from that mysterious depth where memory, dream, and divine spark reside.

The meaning of his saying is that art must be born of authenticity. An artist cannot merely arrange lines and colors with the mind, nor can a poet stitch together clever rhymes and call it truth. True creation emerges from the soul, from the unseen depths that lie beneath thought. It is the cry of the heart, the stirring of the dream, the whisper of the eternal. A picture becomes poetry when it transcends form, when it reaches into the silence of the viewer’s spirit and awakens recognition there.

The ancients knew this mystery well. The Greeks spoke of divine madness, the inspiration of the Muses, which overtakes the poet or the painter. Plato himself declared that the greatest works are not born of reasoned skill, but of possession—the artist seized by a force beyond himself. Jodorowsky’s words echo this ancient belief: the hand may move, the brush may touch canvas, but the true source lies in the unconscious, that shadowed chamber where human longing meets the divine.

History gives us many who embodied this truth. Consider Vincent van Gogh, who painted not as a craftsman of order but as one aflame with vision. His swirling skies, his burning fields of yellow, were not inventions of intellect but eruptions of soul. Critics in his age dismissed him, for they sought neatness and technique. Yet generations after, we feel in his work the force Jodorowsky describes—the picture as poetry, the image as truth from the depths of the inner life.

So too did William Blake, poet and painter, who refused the separation of reason and imagination. For him, art was prophecy; his works were visions of eternity clothed in line and verse. He called the imagination “the body of God,” the place where the human and the divine meet. His art was not calculation—it was revelation. In him, as in Jodorowsky, we see the belief that art flows from the soul’s unconscious depths, not the intellect’s surface.

The lesson for us is clear: do not approach art as an exercise in cleverness or skill alone. Cultivate skill, yes, but remember that skill is only the vessel. The flame must come from deeper fire. To create truly, you must listen to your unconscious, descend into your inner chambers, and allow your soul to speak. Do not be afraid of strangeness, or of what seems irrational, for often the deepest truths arrive in forms the intellect cannot explain.

Practical is this path: when you paint, when you write, when you create, close your eyes to reason and open them to feeling. Let your dreams guide you, let your wounds speak, let your hidden joys rise. Read poetry, look upon art, not to analyze, but to feel the stirring within. For as Jodorowsky teaches, art is poetry born from the unconscious and the soul—and to create in this way is not only to make art, but to touch eternity.