I’m always childishly amused by personality tests. I see them as both wonton and mildly accurate. Half-and-half, part fiction part psychology, these qualitative exams make me chuckle nonetheless.
It’s been awhile since I took one, but fairly unceasingly I’m categorized (on the Meiers-Briggs scale) as an INFP - introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. While I think I sometimes express a bit of INTJ (thinking, judging), I believe that these are forced qualities, brought out by my “work personality.”
One the things that I get a kick out of is a certain “definition” of an INFP. It involves the inner struggle between good/evil, sacred/profane. This could not be more true with me:
“Deeply committed to the positive and the good, yet taught to believe there is evil in them, Healers can come to develop a certain fascination with the problem of good and evil, sacred and profane. Healers are drawn toward purity, but can become engrossed with the profane, continuously on the lookout for the wickedness that lurks within them. Then, when Healers believe thay have yielded to an impure temptation, they may be given to acts of self-sacrifice in atonement. Others seldom detect this inner turmoil, however, for the struggle between good and evil is within the Healer, who does not feel compelled to make the issue public.”
My art seems to be the most profound exploration of this within my life. For some reason I turn toward my art to express this inner struggle. My senior thesis included a series of 12 collograph prints that explored my struggle with my sins and impurities. I can remember standing in front of my class, once again the lone male in the studio, and only upper classman, trying to explain the concept behind my prints. Lost on everyone but my professor, the rest of the students just blinked. For some reason, trying to express this interior Armegeddon on paper was too much for them. I can’t blame them really. I hadn’t shown anything in any of the prior critiques for the semester, and then at the final crit i showed my semester of work. I tend to keep things private and hidden, until they are done (to avoid bias on pieces as they are in development). How I explained my series:
“These 12 pieces were taken from a series entitled “Peccavis.” In the latin rite, this term refers to a “confession of sin.” This series of collographs is based off of the idea of purging oneself, stripping down insecurities and shortcomings. The series is intended to be an abstraction. Not based on form, and only slightly abstracted in color, the collection is an abstraction of emotion. Between each piece, more layers are pulled off, sometimes revealing familiar forms, sometimes showing impressions from previous layers, often revealing color remnants from the preceding layer. While each piece is based off of the previous and following prints in the series, each individual piece is also a new and often raw entity in itself. While the first several prints seem awkwardly handled, they are in fact intetionally overprinted. The process of sin and transgression builds up in one’s soul, often times blurring out the original, beautiful form. The last several prints also seem underdeveloped. Again, this is meant to reflect the nakedness and vulnerability of one’s soul after confession.”
To the rest of the studio, who was pulling prints depicting pine cones or the running shoes from their cross country season, I can easily see why this didn’t fly well.
To this day, however, I’m still obsessed with this trait, which is why MB analysis intruiges me: it puts it’s finger on a few (some are dead wrong) traits that I have that run like a silk thread through my life. I doubt that my struggle with this will ever die out, and that the majority of my art will continue to explore this. At least that gives me material to work with.
