{ Jana Brike } art blog

My solo show "Book of Taboo"

opens in May 14th

in the Distinction art gallery, CA, US.

If you would like to receive a preview of the show, send an email to

melissa@distinctionart.com

With a kind support of ArtHatch and Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia

I am going to be there present, and

if you visit the opening reception, please do come up and introduce yourself,

I'll be happy to have a talk.

Below i share some discontinuous contemplations behind the creation

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The color I use is white. On the one hand, I have painted all the pieces snowbound in the incredibly white Latvian winter, all the world around me glittering light.

On the other hand, white soft light coming from “nowhere” is a willful choice. A “child” archetypically is the bringer of the light, a hero. The main task of a hero is to overcome the darkness (the divine, the unconscious) and bring light (the human, the awareness). Let us remember that with the awareness the world was born – “Let there be light!”

The darkness is female (mommy) and the light is male (daddy), and from darkness through light also a child is born and grows up.

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Hermafroditism is the consolidation of the most surprising and most powerful oppositions. A bisexual being symbolically is both – the projection of the initial entirety as well as a symbolic goal of human self-development.

Thus the cognizance of one’s sex also means the despair of being split and discomfort of growing pains.

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My inspirations have been the paintings of Balthus from the period of 30’s. Here are some:

"The Golden Days"

"Portrait of Andre Derain"

"Therese Dreaming"

"The Violin Lessons"

Balthus insisted that his work “was not erotic but that it recognized the discomforting facts of children's sexuality”. It sounds kind of cunning, but has much sense. The esoteric side of sexuality and innocence is a contemporary taboo.

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The other influence is the symbolism, esoteric paintings and poetry of William Blake.

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." (from Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”)

Hell is a pure unrepressed energy in opposition to the repressive nature of conventional morality of Heaven. Heaven is intellect (spirit), Hell is emotions (soul), and there is nothing condemnable in this Hell of Blake's, and i like his strange construction.

"The Ghost of A Flea" by William Blake

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The psychology of dreams, sub-consciousness, dwells on the borderline between the normal and the pathological psychology. It breeds interconnections to which similar are found just in the combination of mythological ideas – not the mature myths in a form of stories, but their elements – archetypes.

In my previous show, the main archetype which made the visual and ideological backbone was forest.

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Creating a painting is creating a story from archetypes, id est creating a myth.

For an individual, archetype is the thing that manifests the unwitting processes. But the conscious actions are executed by means of logical thinking and willpower.

On the contrary, in a myth/artwork the unwitting functions are logical thinking and willpower, but the sub-conscious psyche determines actions and physical facts.

One cannot explain archetype, one can just “translate” it into language of images, and thus the art is born. Archetype is a constitutional element of psyche and a part of soul connatural to every human.

I do not paint children (underaged persons). I do paint the image of the “child” archetype, which represents a human state with the analytic mind in a slumber condition and with wide-awake hyperactive id.

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Darkness as opposite of light also has the meaning of the ‘sin’ concept.

“Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon” (K.G.Jung). Denying to consciously experience the part of shadow (guilt and shame) in us, lets this shadow out in wild – we see the world as a dark place, tainted by sin. Becoming lovingly related to our shadow, guilt and shame, drags our shadow inside us, we absorb it and we become a light. The objective is not – ‘to feel’ guilt and shame – but it is to recognize and accept it. That is the simple alchemy of my book of taboo.