This self-portrait explores the process of shadow work and marks the end of a two year period of psychoanalysis. Shadow work is the psychological process of confronting and integrating the hidden or repressed parts of ourselves — the traits, desires and impulses we often prefer not to acknowledge.
Branching from the mouth are two oak boughs, the green spring leaves containing the Seven Virtues and the withering autumnal leaves containing the Seven Deadly Sins. At the base of the painting an angel and a demon clutch to my legs and reach toward one another, echoing the gesture from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Rather than God giving life to man, the moment here suggests the meeting of light and shadow within the individual and the process of psychological integration.
As the psychologist Carl Jung wrote:
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”