Helpful things
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” – Carl Jung
In the painting "Grass is always greener on the other side" I deal with the notion of happiness, as well as the misconception that we have to wait for happiness to appear - that it is sought outside or it inhabits somewhere else. It is not uncommon for people to change their place of residence for specific and justified reasons in the hope that it is better in another city or country. They live with the belief that a better quality of life and good career opportunities await them there, and how they would be finally satisfied and fulfilled. However, it often happens that once they move, they realize this new place also has many imperfections. The standard of living is not that high and their expectations of the city (most likely idealized) are quite different from reality. Then they return to their former location or start looking for an alternative. In psychiatry that is called "Airplane Syndrome". People are actually “the happiest” on the plane, in that transition as they travel from one point to another.
Every painting in this body of work introduces a fragment taken out of a particular events, specific moments, objects and places which have positively affected me and left a sense of joy in an inventory of my inner experience; art itself, travel, mountains, sea, love, friendship, artist residency programs, nature etc.
Happiness is always elusive, an ideal to which we aspire to. It is very difficult to define. Through my painting, I try to capture that thin line between the idea that happiness is outside of us and the concept that we need to find happiness within ourselves.
The problem occurs when we condition our happiness with "what if". For example: I will not be happy if I do not achieve what I want, if I do not get something I deserve, if the series of events does not take place according to my will, etc. Here I would like to address the increasingly popular theories that insist on constant positive thinking. While there is nothing wrong with cultivating a consciously optimistic attitude, I believe we need to be careful that our optimism does not become a blind positivity bypass. The way that we do this is we consistently encourage ourselves to remain open to the difficult, the human, and the holy— but this means willingly welcoming pain, displeasure, and sorrow, along with joy.
it is ineffective to think that by simply focusing on the positive, we can somehow heal our wounds and the traumas of the world. To heal and change, we need to develop as a person through the process of self-knowledge, individuation - to use Carl Jung's term.
Searching for ourselves, we descend into our depths to explore our unknown side and to grow on the basis of these insights. On this path of development, we come across the Shadow (Jung), the archetype of the dark that is within us. The shadow is everything that we have denied in ourselves and cast into oblivion - or rather everything that the ego has refused to associate with itself. If we deny the shadow and refuse to accept our negative traits and fears (consider ourselves absolutely good and choose to see exclusively positive things around us), then we hinder our development. In order to reach self-knowledge, we must have the moral courage to become acquainted with our dark part. The goal of individuation is to get to know our archetypal figures, to integrate and make conscious everything about ourselves that was hidden in the shadow in order to get closer to the archetype of wholeness – that which Jung named the ‘Self’.
"The self then is the sum of everything we are now, and everything we once were, as well as everything we could potentially become; it is the symbol of the ‘God within us’, that which we are as a totality." - Harry J. Stead.
Life is magnificent; life is thorny. If we close our hearts and minds to the hard and human, they’re not truly open to the holy, either. We learn both from well-being and from crisis periods in our lives. Wholeness is not to be found in another form of dissociation.