Redtree Times

Between Order and Chaos– Coming to Principle Gallery

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

–Carl Jung

I am busy getting ready this morning for the Gallery Talk I will be presenting this coming Saturday, September 28, at the Principle Gallery, beginning at 1 PM. Part of this preparation is finishing new work and packing up that work as well as the painting that will be given away in a free drawing for those at the talk, along with a few other surprises. You have to come to the talk to know what those will be.

Point of Contact — You Could Win It!

Along with the new work, I am also bringing four favorites of mine from the past decade. One is the painting above, Between Order and Chaos, shown above. It is a piece that jumped out at me in many ways since it was first painted. The post below from a couple of years back explains one of those aspects.

There is a philosophical concept called Unus Mundus— Latin for One World. Its premise is basically that behind the evident chaos of this world and the universe there is a unifying realm of absolute knowledge on which all existence is based.

It has been around for ages, going back in some form to the ancient Greeks. In the last century, Carl Jung became the biggest advocate of this theory, using it to explain the similarity in the content and construct of the myths and stories of the cultures and their belief systems. Each represents the discovery of some small bit of the order or pattern contained in chaos surrounding this world and becomes a recurring symbol, forming what Jung termed as an archetype. 

I describe an archetype as being how there are universal reactions and interpretations to certain images. One of the main reasons I use the Red Tree and the Red Roof, the Red Chair, and the ball in the sky that serves as the sun/moon is that each translates seamlessly across cultures. You don’t need specific cultural knowledge to understand the reality they symbolize. Each carries universal meaning.

This theory, the Unus Mundus, is what I see as the force behind the new painting at the top, Between Order and Chaos. It’s about how we struggle to create order in the face of constant chaos (represented in the sky’s slashing marks) with the orderliness of the flower beds representing this attempt.

The round flower bed caught in the curve of the path echoes the sun above. I see it somewhat as a symbol of synchronicity, another term coined by Jung. He uses it to explain some coincidences that seem to have some sort of meaning though there is no explanation for this feeling.

A coincidence might be just that or it might be that we have unwittingly come in contact with a strand of the Unus Mundus.

I sometimes feel as I have had fleeting moments of synchronicity but I can’t be sure of that.

How does one really know such a thing?

And I can’t say that we will ever learn more about or understand the Unus Mundus or the meaning of synchronicity, even though it might be for the betterment of us all as a species.

Perhaps we have become too comfortable living in this slice of the universe between order and chaos?

I don’t know. But for now, it’s all we have.