Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 665
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We are wordlessly persuaded and taught outright to hide so much of what we have unearthed in our lives. But artists throughout the centuries have described the power of using anguish as a catalyst to fuel their creativity. In Greek epic poetry, ‘Kleos’ refers to immortal renown. Unlike present-day fame, this term referred exclusively to heroes who had surmounted a great obstacle or persevered through tremendous difficulties. There is a certain authority that comes from those who have endured hardship. They have earned the depth of their work.
Darkness contains a great deal of energy. We can use it for destruction or creativity. Only those who tolerate it are able to illuminate the shadowy corners, revealing the nefariousness that hopes to stay hidden. We cannot change our past, or any hell that we have been through. But art provides the means to exorcise the pain that has taken up residence in our body and fashion it into a form outside ourselves, in an infinitely affirmative gesture. The darkness we have passed through was not endured in vain if we mold it into a vision that lights the way out… for us, and for all the other souls who undoubtedly need it.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 562
“Shadow,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20,” in progress
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Jung observed that complexes could affect groups of people en masse. He saw that certain moments seemed to be expressions of a collective shadow, a bursting forth of a mass psychosis; the repressed side of a whole group coming alive; a tribal Mr. Hyde. He saw this madness first-hand in Germany in the 1930s and wrote about it. But every era carries some measure of collective shadow.
One could argue that no moment in time has seen more of the reality of human darkness than ours. Having witnessed the Holocaust and faced the threat of nuclear war in the twentieth century, and now facing the environmental impact of fossil fuels and plastics in the twenty-first century, we are undoubtedly aware of more of humanity’s potential for destruction than any of our ancestors ever were. Such a view does not come from a moralizing stance. Our era has made forced witnesses of us all.
The shadow is about where we put the Devil – where do we allow darkness to be housed? Racism and bigotry offer the relief of foisting our group’s shadow onto another whom we view as lesser. Doing so enables us not to look at or feel our shadow, and not see our own worst selves. But this collective shadow of our modern culture is also bigger and wider than group-to-group projections. There are culture-wide or civilization expressions of the collective shadow.
Jung saw the widespread loss of connection to the inner life and to a lived spirituality as one of the primary illnesses of our time. He observed that people were no longer animated by the traditional religions… For Jung, this meant that we’ve lost the old way but not yet found the new, and are sitting in a spiritual vacuum.
Into that vacuum, without our awareness, has slipped our fascination with human technology. Observe people closely today and you’ll notice that we have an almost magical faith in our devices. People see their computers and phones as all-knowing and expect them to function perfectly all the time, and view pharmaceuticals as magic cure-alls. Where we used to put God, we now have put technology. Where spirit was, we have unconsciously placed human genius.
Gary Bobroff in Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell
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