Bitter moon
120x120, oil on canvas
This painting series is part of a project based on females' dreams. Several women were interviewed, sharing a dream that left an unusual impact on their memories. Dream symbolism in Carl Jung's psychoanalytical theories is crucial for analysing the individual's subconscious layers and anxieties of the personality. Archetypes, mythological analogies, and fantasies manifest themselves in dreams and discover sides of the personality that are usually repressed. Laconically, but with emotional expressiveness, I am trying to interpret a visual metaphor of the feelings that dreams are accompanied with. Comparing dream translation similarities from different sources and universally accepted signs, I am interested in deciphering dream symbolism according to tales from myths. The notion of presence and absence is central. Contrasting solid and transparent paint, lines and thick layers, real and surreal elements, I tend to portray the controversial psychic experience that mixies illusion and reality.
In Bitter moon Three black dogs were staring constantly at the sitting in bed girl, who woke up terrified after hearing the furious bark behind the door, closed before that scene. After entering 'the room', they surprisingly stood calm and silent conversation filled up the space. I chose this part of the dream for my composition as it is intimate, vague, and surreal, and its ambiguity turns into narrative.
The dogs are emphasized as a central subject and look detached from the conversation. Yet, despite of the blurred face, the female is in paralyzed contact with them, questioning? The erased portrait features, replaced by barbed wire brings the assumption of a scene that she does not really see but only imagine, real enough as a harmful experience. The surroundings is only marked to direct the narrative to probable interpretations.
The first analogy with mythological account that appeared was the story about the Three-headed dog Cerberus that guards the gates of the Underworld in Greek mythology. According to Dream-translation sources, multiple dogs in a dream refer to the presence of enemies.
Height. Eyes wide shut.
100x100, oil on canvas
A portrait of a young woman in a composition that suggests a figure lying down on a bed or a couch, crossing the surface of the canvas, but as the female is standing weightlessly in an uncomfortable pose, looking like she floats above the surroundings in the background, this scene is an interpretation of a dream, where the young woman recalls repetitive experience of herself flying around her house.
I wanted to express the sensitive memory about this imaginary flight. Juxtaposition between colourful and black and white areas is an approach which illustrates the fiction in the experience. Slight distortion hints the idea that this is not really happening and responds to the way mind and body dissolve and disappear when falling into unconscious sleep. The green dress is dominant as it sinks in green the whole space and reflects the way reality loses contours, shapes, and colours when the women closes her eyes. The subject in the background reminds distant pieces of a bedroom - that intimate, lonely space, previlliged to shelter the inhabitant
and 'transport him/her' to the most confusing chimeras of their fantasies.
The sight of the women send also an ambiguous message - anxious, seductive, or in defence? Nobody knows what exactly is behind the cloak of this silent flight.
Escape
150x100, Oil on canvas
Memory
140x180, Oil on canvas
Conor Harrington
Rebeca Fountaine-Wolf
Drawing inspiration and influenced by the figurative works of Rebecca Fountane-Wolf and Conor Harrington, I continue exploring techniques of distorted realism, abstract-figurative approach, drawing and painting, mixing acrylic woth oil paint and charcoal, with the tendency to move into more abstract field and interpretations of figurative compositions, lately influenced my Michal Armitage and Cecily Brown.
I am equally atracted to tho colourful palette of Harrington and the monochrome one of Wolf, therefore, my purpose in further quests is to adapt partially both techniques and palettes to a homogeneous style and find a method, approach, and individuality to define and refine my authentic and personalized style, to remove the unnecessary information and reduce the experimentation.