Answer #7- Acknowledge the Darkness

So I thought I'd take on a light topic for Friday. Yeah, maybe it's not a good idea. I should leave the discussion of Good and Evil to greater minds than mine, like Niezsche and Jung and Kierkegaard and Homer Simpson. But I do think it is important to know we have darkness in us, and that there is darkness everywhere in the world. The truly good person, not just a "nice" person, knows this and recognizes this and then makes a choice, knowing that we all have a bit of 'creepy' inside us. Sometimes in our dreams we are seeing and doing things that shock us in our waking life, and make us grateful for that morning alarm clock (Aauurgh, I was a pansexual zombie! And my teeth were falling out! And I had bad hair! Where did that come from?) Jung calls all those uncomfortable, unacceptable feeling we have our "Shadow". If we deny the Shadow it only grows stronger.

If we acknowledge it then we have power over it. (Remember the weeping televangelist in the news a few years ago who went on and on about the evils of sex and then was found in a motel with a hooker? Textbook case.) I think I really dumbed down Carl Jung there but I only have a limited space (or attention span). Nonetheless, darkness is an interesting topic for artists and actors Who doesn't relish dressing up as a psychopathic villain or femme fatale and just pretending to be evil? Oh, maybe that's me....... again.......Catharsis in action. But it makes me wonder, do real psychopaths have a Shadow, and is that shadow an angel?
And if we don't have a dark side then why are we so attracted to shows like Dexter, or Breaking Bad, or even the interminable CSI series? In Dexter we are literally rooting for a stone cold killer, but one with a code, at least. Now there's a guy who struggles with his Shadow, and then sort of lets it win. In the fantasy world we have the hero and the arch-nemesis: Sherlock and Moriarty, Batman and the Joker, Superman and Zod, Buffy and, well, lots of vampires , with the implication that they are really two sides of the same coin (again with the Shadow).

Even the gospel of Mark sends Jesus into the desert for 40 days for a chat with Satan. What else is this but a conversation with the dark side, and a final decision to never let it have power over him?
Most of my artwork tends to be sunny with a side of cute, sometimes mysterious or abstract, sometimes just slapdash and incoherent. But here are a series of abstract images I created for a small art journal called Noir. (and yes I love Film Noir and Noir fiction from the 40's, pitch black and dialogue dripping with acid).
  The first image acknowledges the death of a friend in 2005, and a brief note I wrote in my journal about it. Art with a back story is still hard for me, hence the safety of the abstract. One day I will do something to express the loss of a student of mine who was murdered in 2004. But not yet.