Erosion

Okay, whew, this is going to be a lot of explanation.

So this is the first thing I did for a body of work based on Beauty for my Art class at school. I chose to do beauty through mental illness, since it has been something that has been very prevalent throughout my entire life.

So with this first painting, I was in a very dark place with depression earlier this year, I have only recently surpassed it through a ongoing stream of meds and a cluster of therapy sessions. And I wanted to really display how it kind of felt in my head a lot of the time, where the world seemed so against me even though it wasn't and I was ready to quit at any point. But the beauty from going through all of that stuff is that, and this was something Joshua Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age said in some interviews from earlier this year, that you never truly know something until everything goes wrong, and that was the thing, having depression made me view life without the innocent glasses of naive innocence or ridiculous bigotry through patronising teenage angst. For once, even though I was sad, everything around me was either disappointing or terrible, I strived to try climb back up, to take control for once and view life in such a unbiased, truthful way, accepting stuff for what it is or was, not always downplaying it or putting too much hyperbole into it. And I did, eventually, for FUCKING once!

So enough with the big personal, possibly pretentious explanation behind it all, I actually explain the painting now. I wanted to make something that looked really dirty, like it had layers torn of it and was scarred with dried blood and stains. I was inspired by the cover-art of 'The Downward Spiral' by Nine Inch Nails (Again, another huge influence on the whole entire thing), which was a mixed-media composition by a artist by the name of Russell Mills titled 'Wound'. I painted a huge section with a mix of dark colours, then the rest I covered with white paint and watercolours. The watercolours were 'self-mixed' so to say, since I really wanted that drab, damaged look to everything. I let a lot of it bleed freely, even let certain sections become washed away with the watercolours so it look sort of like a deep scar or a flesh wound.

As for the person in the bottom corner, creating him was... interesting. Personally, I think it kind of hinders the composition a bit, I was really unsure of adding him, but I felt I needed to since it was for a subject based on beauty, so it had to have that human element. I don't mind him personally, I know that's probably ironic to say, but he provides a focal point, as the big mess of dark colours glooms upon him, kind of like if the world was about to crash upon him. He also taught me that I should paint everything with the tiniest brush possible, since it would have been good to represent him in a more detailed manner than looking like a sketch out of some kid's notebook. I did initially base him on some creatures out of the Silent Hill games (*deep*, I know) since they were usually based on the manifestations of the protagonist's mental state, and usually featured screwed up posture or elongated limbs.

So there you go, a painting based on the beauty of Depression. I have more to come (or upload), but I hope you all enjoy this one for now.