Man in the Mirror

This painting began with a dream: a man reaching into a mirror. I took that image into the studio in an experimental Rorschach process using unstretched canvas, which I could fold in half. The Rorschach method felt right for a work about duality — the fold is both the mirror and the meeting point. Jung understood the shadow not as something to be overcome but as the other half of a conversation the self is always having with itself. Descartes drew a hard line between mind and body, subject and world. This painting is interested in what lives on that line. While the two appear to be doing a dance, a seam down the middle with a white line appears, separating the two as if a book pealing open, or a crack between dimensions. Not two figures but one reflected, stepping into himself. The part of us that cannot be neatly divided into conscious and unconscious, dreaming and waking, self and reflection, the push and pull we experience in inner turmoil or strife, or the achievement of balance between yin and yang.

Beginning as a Rorschach printing experiment on unstretched canvas, inspired by a dream image of a man reaching into a mirror, and grabbing his own hand. Looking at the two sides of self, the ego and the shadow, conscious and unconscious, dream state and awake, the painting considers Cartesian dualism and Jung's theory of dreams and the shadow self. The two figures interact like a person catching their reflection in a mirror and at the same time doing a dance. The pattern itself appears both cat-like in its symmetry, and also alludes to the female reproductive system.