Nigredo Blackness

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Nigredo Blackness

The Catharsis of Ophelia

Nigredo Blackness. Today I looked at some of my digital paintings from the Nigredo series, and I found out that many of them were left unfinished. I was especially interested in one of those images, the one that best represents the Nigredo phase, one that has actually a lot of black matter in it, an almost entirely black and white piece.

This artwork inspired me the most because it is very crude: deep dark shadows grow from the doll‘s hair, there is no trace of growing purple flowers as in one of my previous oil paintings, only the darkest and gloomiest black brooks come out of her head, like if they were evil thoughts.

These dark filaments may stand for nightmares, or whatever is difficult in one person’s mind to contain: at one stage of life, a  frightening and uncontrollable depression can take over the body, and the subject may fall into a crisis in order to throw this depression out.

It could be hatred or deep pain, the difficult stage of accepting separation from other loved humans, whatever it may be, a sense of great contradiction invades the body, and the subjects starts to want to expell it.

With the Nigredo phase, all that is very upsetting in a person’s psyche, transforms into positive liveliness, but only after a long stage of mourning, and a period of immobility in which Nature attempts to reconnect to the lost body.

I found that this particular artwork was unfinished, it was only a sketch submersed into a pile of many other sketches, and today I took some time out to redesign the doll’s forhead, adjusting the shadows and the dimension of the entire piece, and I can say it is ready for print.

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Look at this artwork
Nigredo Blackness in print >>

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Nigredo Blackness

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