Being an introvert is something that really defines me. It is part of my personality.  It’s not necessarily the core but it definitely influences my everyday life, my friendships, network or working method. If it has such a big impact on me, I believe that it’s important to understand it in more depth. Although this sounds like a truly personal motivation, the aim of this research is not to unravel my identity, but to be able to gain a tool through a more general psychological research.

I have always been interested in how the creator’s personality influences the artworks. Since I was a kid, I’ve always unconsciously tried to imagine the artist itself based on the artwork; is s/he old, young, talkative, quiet, rigorous or playful etc. I believe that most people try to imagine the personality of their ‘heroes’ – whether those ‘heroes’ are teachers, bosses, celebrities or artists.  Our behaviour describes ourselves, says the Hungarian proverb, but how much an artwork can actually tell about the artist? Does the artwork have a personality or is it just a simple and straightforward reflection on the artists?

Visual language is communication. Where not only the subject and the content matters but the style, the mood and the tools used as well. These significant details create the identity of an artwork, and I believe that this identity is just as important as the message itself, as the tone and the style will define the audience/target of the work. Therefore, finding the right identity is a cardinal question in the process of making an artwork. How can I find the appropriate style and identity for my work? What does that communicate? How does it affect the viewer? And how can I manipulate and control the mood of the audience?

To explore this subject, it’s worth starting with the theory of Carl Gustav Jung, who was one of the first to create this psychological phrase. Even though the popular understanding and psychological usage nowadays differs from how he originally intended, still many contemporary studies refer to his theory.

The book, Psychological Types by Carl Gustav Jung, published in 1921, includes the theory of introverts-extroverts. Jung theorizes that each person falls into a category, either introversion or extroversion. According to him, the two mutually exclusive attitudes are the core of our personality. The main difference is the energy acquisition, “Each person seems to be energized more by either the external world (extraversion) or the internal world (introversion).”

He compares these types to ancient archetypes, Dionysus and Apollo. An extrovert is linked to Dionysus, who actively involved in the world of people. An extrovert is focused on the outside world of objects, sensual perception and action. Energetic and lively, the extrovert may lose their sense of self in the intoxication of Dionysian pursuits. An introvert is associated with Apollo, who shines a light on understanding. The introvert is focused on the internal world of reflection, dreaming and vision. Thoughtful and insightful, the introvert can sometimes be uninterested in joining the activities of others. They are more comfortable living alone and being themselves. They are also getting easily tired after or meantime big social activities, therefore they depend more on me-time to recharge. They also tend to be introspective and keep their social circle limited.

Jung observes that none of us is completely extroverted or introverted, but we certainly connect to one or the other attitude. In all of us, lies an unconscious mind, which is not conscious of feelings and thoughts all the time, but those feelings and thoughts can affect our lives nonetheless. “If you take an extrovert you will find his unconscious has an introverted quality because all the extraverted qualities are played out in his consciousness and the introverted are left in the unconscious.” It means if extroverts could control when and how to bring their introvert personality to the front, and as well, introverts could enlarge their extroversion, then they could have more command over their mental space.  Since both personalities have a downside, both could benefit from the other. An extrovert depends more on the environment, needs external impulses. But in life, we all have situations when we need more me time to find a solution to our problems. The same with introverts, they depend more on their own thoughts and feelings, which could generate a cage, isolating them from the outside world. If they could consciously work on switching and emphasizing their extrovert qualities and decide to speak with someone about their problems, the might solve the situation.

Jung said that we all think, feel, sense and experience the world in many different ways. He identified four essential psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each function may be experienced in an introverted or an extroverted way, and one of these functions is more dominant in each one of us. One depends on thinking and feeling rather than sensing and intuiting.

Carl Gustav Jung and his theory, Psychological Types is a definitive work and has a big impact on the later psychologists. Even though he built a good base, the popular understanding and psychological usage differ from his original intent today. Jung’s theory has limitations, such as categorizing people whose values are close to the middle range of the scale. These people are not, extroverts nor introverts: they are in between. This is a general problem with type-based theories even if the scale of the category is 4,8,16 or 32. Identifying and analysing black and white is great, but the grey zone between is blurry. Therefore psychologists developed different methodologies called trait-based rather than a type-based model.

Big-Five (also known as the five-factor model (FFM), and the OCEAN model,) is probably the most popular and widely accepted taxonomy for personality traits. The essence of the theory group is that they can be classified into five-factor groups according to the factor-analytic order of different personality features.  Big Five personality taxonomy was introduced in the 1950s by Warren Norman. The five personality traits of the Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism, extraversion. Each of the traits contains two separate, but correlated, aspects reflecting a level of personality, opposite statements are shown to determinate which statement is relevant according to the person and how accurate it is to his/her personality.

Openness to experience: This trait explores how much people are mentally interested, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty, and willing to try new things. On the one end of the dimension, people are usually more creative and sensitive to their feelings than those who are locked and opened for art, culture, emotions, adventures, and general curiosity. They are more likely to have unconventional convictions.

Conscientiousness: Conscience tends to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive to achieve measures or external expectations. This is related to how people control their impulses. The highest scores of conscience indicate the intended rather than the spontaneous behaviour preference. The average level of conscience increases among young adults and then decreases among older adults.

Agreeableness: The friendship factor is usually referred to as the ability to maintain relationships. Some say that there is a kind of obedient service, care and emotional support that requires negating negative feelings. At the other end of the dimension, it refers to the discomfort, the opposing or the opposite, which can go to hostility.

Neuroticism: Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression. Anxiety balance is perhaps the most important contrast of the factor, but the term itself covers a lot of the factor itself. The person at one end of the dimension: emotionally balanced, able to face stressful situations smoothly. The person at the other end of the dimension: prone to unrealistic thinking, low self-esteem, somatic symptoms, less able to control impulses.

Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is an American psychologist, the scientific director at the Imagination Institute, University of Pennsylvania, United States. He is known for his researches on the field of cognitive science, educational psychology and positive psychology. In 2015, he gave a lecture at the Imagination Institute, in which he introduced the scientific aspect and background of introversion.

His presentation was based on the Big Five personality traits system, but he introduced the Big Five personality trait hierarchy. In the modern psychology there are two fundamental, top dimensions, which is stability (connecting to neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness) and plasticity (connecting to extraversion and openness to experience). Below the Big Five level each one of them has its own aspects such as withdrawal, volatility, compassion, orderliness, enthusiasm, assertiveness, intellect etc. Stability is about how much a person likes to order her/his life, how much he/she likes things to go in a set way. Plasticity is about how much a person would like to engage in the world. Scott Barry explains how the dopamine system affects some of the trait elements. Dopamine is an organic chemical of the catecholamine and phenethylamine families that plays several important roles in the brain and body. In popular culture and media, dopamine is often seen as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine signals the perceived motivational prominence of an outcome, which in turn propels the organism's behaviour toward or away from achieving that outcome. Dopamine is not responsible for pleasure itself, it doesn’t guarantee the joy but it guarantees that a person will be excited by the possibility of it. It increases the sensitivity to reward value of information.  Rewards which are evolutionally evolved, deep ancestral rewards. People who are very high at the extraversion dimension get really excited about social attention and status such as money, sexual opportunities, power, food etc.  If extraversion is openness for excitement than introversion is the opposite, it is openness for quietness, not being interested in social status. Introverts on average are much more interested in solitude. Recent neuroscience found a new network in brain called “default mode network”. Default Mode Network (DMN) is a large-scale brain network of interacting brain regions. DMN can contribute to elements of experience that are related to external task performance. This network is active when a person is turning its tension inward, when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about their selves, remembering about the past, and planning the future, so when someone deeply reflects on something. On average people who use this network more often are highly open to experiences, and introverts are also more likely to have a high openness to experiences. More likely to read the benefit of solitude, to think deeply about the experiences the person has.

The Psychological Types by Carl Gustav Jung demolished the complex human’s personality into two main, well-distinguished elements, extroversion and introversion. This theory outlined that these personalities are fundamentally different and accordingly have different needs. Those needs define what we are looking for, what we are open for and what we care about in everyday life and also as an audience. The type of impulses that are pleasant, environments, which are safe and inviting for an introvert. According to Jung, introverts are more comfortable living alone and being themselves. They are also getting easily tired after or meantime big social activities, therefore they depend more on me-time to recharge. It means they prefer a calm surrounding with low stimulus and they avoid crowds. An introvert is looking for internal moments, when s/he can easily get lost in his/her mind.

The Big Five personality trait system refined Jung’s theory and showed that a person is more complex. In trait-based models, there are no types but a spectrum on which anyone can rate somewhere along. Big Five has reveald that introverts’ social behaviour is a type of external observer. Being an observer is not a social exclusion but a choice. This role and choice is made with pleasure by introverts. This is the position they feel comfortable in, it allows them to be more analytical, and have a different point of view. This analyzing and observer status can be provided by an artwork or created by a designer. It also highlights that introverts like to keep one step distance, they like to be isolated, therefore we need more time and probably patience to get to know an introvert. Pace is an important element as well. Not just because it takes time to get know them but also because introverts needs more time to process information, experiences, as this is something related to the analytic personality mark.

In the last part I introduced a lecture by Dr.Scott Barry Kaufman. His presentation is based on an improved Big Five personality trait system, but he is approaching introversion from a scientific aspect. He claims that dopamine production is one of the chemical process, which makes a big difference between extroverts and introverts.  While extroverts has higher, introverts has lower dopamine activities in they brain. This, besides scientifically confirming the previously noted psychological theories, such as the needs about social status and interest of introverts, also leads to imagination. DMN (Default Mode Network) is active when a person is turning its tension inward, high DMN activities increase great imagination skills, since thinking abstract ideas is something introverts often do, they can have a higher, well developed imagination skill, and therefore they needs can be higher for abstraction, to activate they imagination.

Based on my research, I can easily conclude that defining introversion is a complex task, and we can’t say it’s one personality, but it’s rather a segment of a whole. Concluding from that it’s also difficult to call an artwork introverted. Or at least it would be a very superficial judgement. However there are certain qualities (based on psychological traits) that are connected to introversion and those can be translated to art analysis. Introverts prefer less socially engaged surroundings with a lower level for input, therefore an artwork or medium that requires the viewer to be alone or in a more isolated, less busy environment with low stimulus stimulates similar qualities. Pace is another important component. Artworks that require longer time to process or evolve with sufficient time spent on them help the viewer to have an analytical approach and it provokes them to search in depth. Introversion is closely connected to analysis; by the use of time and pace an artwork can provide a sufficient environment for that. Along with strong analytic skills, introverts have a vivid imagination which comes with a higher need of abstraction. Artworks that provide space for free interpretation support that quality. In the following chapter I will analyse several artworks based on these qualities in order to further examine specific case studies about introversion and it’s connection to art.

Analysing an image is important and very useful, to deeply understand a project, artwork. Learning the tools, and the way of expressions other artists are using is indispensable to create your own style and visual language. In this chapter I will use the knowledge I learnt form the first chapter to apply to visuals. I will analyse artworks which are related to introversion in a system I outlined in the previous chapter. The artworks are selected based on medium, content and visual language. I chose these artists and they works because I personally relate to them and they represent the mediums I like the most and want to work on in the future.

I will analyse the following artworks based on the keywords I highlighted in the last part in the previous chapter such as abstraction, pulses, observer, get lost and pace. I will look at how these artworks were made, what are they communicating with my point of view, what are the visual tools, colour, motion graphic, typography.

Donald Schenkel (born in 1991) is a Dutch painter, based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He creates soft gradients with oil paints on canvas and different type of surface. Schenkel was studying at the Willem de Kooning Academie (WDKA), on Fine Art & Design Teacher Training department, graduated in 2017. During his studies he became interested in colours study and painting, and as a school project he stared to develop his own technique and approach to create different colour gradients.

The paintings look very clean. Mostly two or three colours are on the canvas or even only one colour is going from dark shade to light. The colours Shcenkel is working with the most are blue, green, black, white. The transition between the colours or shades are endless and very smooth. The orientation of the gradient can be vertical or horizontal as well, but no radial and the angle of the gradient is either 90° or 0°. Therefore the composition is always horizontal or vertical but never diagonal. The scale of the painting is rather large, at least 2 meters height and the format is petty narrowed. Schenkel creates these paintings with oil paint on canvas but lately he also uses different surfaces such as glass.

The reason I choose Donald Schenkel’s works is that they are paintings, but I believe that they are basically very graphical. Even though I know it needs good painting skills to create them, visually they are gradient strokes interact with each other. That is inspiring me. Beside that, in my opinion these are great examples to start this chapter with. The viewer can recognize many keywords from the first chapter. It is an abstract visualization which gives space for personal interpretation, and analysis. The viewer must have the patience to look at the details and to let be affected by them. The gradients is static but actually looks like there is a nice slow motion. These together create a nice isolated atmosphere and moments.

Book and publication is also an appropriate medium for connect with introversion. Book is such an intimate object. The viewer is forced to be alone, while s/he reads it, is closing the outside, focusing on the internal world, using its imagination. Also, the pace of the reading, the advancement and structure is more strict comparing with Ikeda’s video installation which is endless. In a book the reader cannot just jump in randomly on a page and start to read, nevertheless, it can quite whenever it wants. The duration of the reading experience is longer, takes hours, days, weeks, having an internal monologue in the breaks, building a world in the reader mind.  That is the reason I chose Lüthi, especially Black Pages, and The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt. It feels he really knows this medium, he knows how to use the endowments of the object. He plays with the rhythm, and with the reader. Knows when to slow down and not afraid of using one page for a sentence, or when to give more information to the reader. It is not only about communication, but the experience of reading. The balance between the content and design, every page is an image.  In these publications he often uses fragmented text with short lines, which are not necessarily aligned to each other, creating a nice flow with typography. Sometimes almost becomes the style of concrete poetry but more abstract. Concrete poetry or shape poetry is a poem that displays the content message, or just the opposite, with the specific graphic-typographic layout of the letters, words, texts, verses and erses at the same time. Though the poetry tradition known since ancient times, the literary-historical significance gained only in the 20th century, thanks to Guillaume Apollinaire's work.  This direction was quite popular in the 70’s with nice examples, but nowadays became more obvious, lost the quality of abstraction and using more evident symbols and images. In Lüthi’s publication I feel he uses the spread as image instead of the text.