Chiaroscuro
The art of Jungian shadow work
Art is a great way to learn to work through stress, trauma, and grief, but it’s also a great method to get in touch with your shadow. Through this episode (above), we’re going to look at chiaroscuro as an artistic method, Jungian shadow work, and explore themes that bring out raw emotions.
WHAT IS CHIAROSCURO?
Chiaroscuro (from Italian chiaro, “light,” and scuro, “dark”) is a technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow to define three-dimensional objects. It’s about using an abundance of darkness and using light sparingly to enhance depth and mood. But today, we’ll explore it through the light and dark or our conscious versus unconscious mind – and why it matters on your creative journey.
Artists Who’ve Used Chiaroscuro:
· Artemisia Gentileschi
· Leonardo da Vinci
· Lavinia Fontana
· Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
· Diego Velázquez
· Rembrandt
· Francisco de Goya
· Peter Paul Rubens
THE SHADOW SELF
Our “shadow self” as defined by Jung lives through our unconscious mind, aspects we’ve denied in ourselves, everything that our ego refuses to acknowledge but we see in others. This includes sexuality, impulsiveness, violence, intuition, fear, recklessness, desire, passion, greed, and our deepest, darkest thoughts that often invoke shame or guilt.
Our “shadow self” often plays out in what we project into the world if we’re not cognizant of it or refuse to recognize it. Jung warned that someone who is unconscious of themselves, “acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.”
The shadow self is also likened to Freud’s breakdown of the unconscious mind, which is covered in a past post on resilience building in the description box below. It’s essentially a part of our minds that are repressed from sexual drive to anger.
In this episode of Veteran Art Studio, I use Fyodor Dostoevsky as my subject for the demonstration. I hated reading his books in high school, but I didn’t understand why until I went through the process of my own shadow work.
In dreams, the shadow self plays out in ways that highlight fear, aggression, sex, and many other aspects of our minds that express our base emotions and desires – things we might push away in our awakened, conscious state. But much of our shadow self, our unconscious mind, is not just about negative traits, they also house positive aspects of ourselves that we’ve rejected.
The inability to acknowledge our “shadow self” impedes personal growth and often manifests as projecting insecurities onto others. The answer is to get to know our shadow self, what we’re repressing, and think about what causes us to lash out the most. Our shadow self is everything our ego is rejecting, and often shows up mirrored to us in everything that arouses strong emotion.
The denial of the shadow self is a rejection of everything we’ve judged as unacceptable about ourselves. And if you allow it to go ignored, it continues to grow until it’s acknowledged. Becoming conscious of the shadow self insists on a brand of personal courage to face what makes us uncomfortable and bring it into the light. Because the shadow never disappears, and so long as we keep trying to repress it with feigned positivity, it only grows to balance out the ego’s act.
If you take time to explore your shadow self, delve into what arouses strong emotions within you – sans judgment – you give yourself the opportunity to achieve a sense of wholeness and the opportunity to genuinely see it in others.
Additional Reading:
Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott
Psyche and Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C.G. Jung
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by C.G. Jung
Delphi Complete Works of Artemisia Gentileschi
