Shadow Art

Carl Gustav Jung

So I digress. I was intending to write a post covering the second painting in the 'Eve' series, 'The Temptation Of Adam'. But, as I was drawing the profile picture of one of the most pivotal characters of my book, 'The Substance of Things Hoped For', a thought occurred to me.

as I drew the picture of the Animus, I realized how dark the picture looked. How...demonic. As a Christian, I usually shy away from such depictions; I don't even watch horror movies. And the very last thing I would want to do is offend someone's sensibilities or be a stumbling block to anyone, so to speak. Even so, much Christian art, or much art with religious subject matter, often has some pretty horrific depictions. Just look at this painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. On the surface, Goya didn't look like the kind of guy who would paint stuff like this, but this thing is straight up nightmare fuel (As an aside, it's said he died alone in his house surrounded by creepy paintings).

Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya

Another religious-themed painting that creeps me out is this painting of Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake.

Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake...creeping you out and keeping you up at night.

Yet, as I drew this picture of my character, I thought of how appropriate it looked. You see, in the story the Animus is the shadow of the book's protagonist. In analytical psychology, also called Jungian psychology for its founder Carl Jung, the shadow represents submerged or repressed personality traits that we all have buried deep in our subconscious. Often, these things are negative traits that we repress or refuse to allow expression, like our anger. Sometimes, these repressed aspects of our personality may be positive as well, but for whatever reason we refuse to allow them to surface. Jung's idea was that in order for us to be fully functional, mentally healthy individuals, we need to find healthy ways of integrating these repressed traits, our shadow, into our being. Jung once said that "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

This is probably where we get the notion of the shadow as being a purely evil thing, and in media it's often portrayed this way. An excellent example of this is the original Star Trek episode, 'The Enemy Within'. After a transporter accident, Captain Kirk is split into two beings - one is his good side, the other...well see for yourself:

Captain Kirk's shadow-side having a bad day.

The Good, the Bad, and ...you get the idea.

So that brings me back to my story. While writing "The Substance Of Things Hoped For", I didn't want it obvious to the reader right away who or what the Animus was. I wanted it to be a

mysterious figure that the reader would have to think, "who is this?" So I created the Animus as an amorphous, shadowy creature without any obvious features or physical characteristics. So, the Animus looks how it looks. Even the term animus is taken straight from Jungian psychology, even though my version of animus differs somewhat from Jung's definition . Of course, with my book being a sci-fi/fantasy adventure story, I needed to make the Animus somewhat threatening and scary as well, since it is also the villain of the piece after all. Heck, even the Evil Queens in all the Disney classics were pretty scary.

Benjamin Bishop and his shadow, the Animus

So there you have it. A crash course in art history, Jungian psychology, and the background on my book, "The Substance Of Things Hoped For", all in one convenient blog post. See you guys in the next one.