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Interview with Russian fine art photographer and multimedia artist Natalia Drepina: tenebrous emotional portraits

Posted on by Diana Marin

The fine art photography of Natalia Drepina explores human frailty, fears, and melancholy, often in cold, quiet dreamscapes with a tinge of ominousness. Her conceptual realm is reminiscent of dark fairytales, conveyed through a soft, gloomy, painterly aesthetic. Darkness, a sense of sorrow, and lyricism are also the distinguishing marks of her multimedia art pieces—showcasing a mixture of poetry, voice-over, videos, as well as haunting sounds and instrumentals. Whilst her projects are deeply intimate—metaphors for her soul, portraying aspects of the human condition, the poetic message conveyed is disguised, symbolic, just as dream imagery. We had the chance to find out the thoughts behind the art, as well as getting to know Natalia beyond her artistic persona, as she was open to revealing more about her lifestyle and her views on inspiration and mortality.

Fine art photograph bloody woman

DM: Where does your fascination with melancholy, sorrow, and the darker aspects of the mind spring from? Is melancholy a dominant emotion in your real life as well as in your artistic world?

ND: I’m truly a melancholy person. My sadness, which has been living in me for many years, has become my friend. I learned to see a special beauty in these emotions and draw inspiration.

DM: What is Natalia like in everyday life otherwise and how do you think your loved ones or people who know you best would describe you? Would they associate you with the same feelings you evoke in your projects or are these feelings purged through your art?

ND: People often tell me that I’m weird. Perhaps this word best describes me. I would also call myself inspired and pensive, because I’m always between two worlds – imagination and reality.
I’m rather unsociable, I prefer solitude and silence, rather than meeting and talking with people. But sometimes I also like talking with animals, birds, insects and plants. Nature is a place where I feel happy and calm. People scare me a little.
Of course, in everyday life I’m not always sad, I’m familiar with the spectrum of human emotions, but nevertheless, even in moments of happiness, I feel a strange longing, as if beauty and happiness also hurt in their own way.
I believe that my soul speaks the language of poetry, because true poetry combines pain and beauty, giving rise to a special feeling, a special vision of the world.

DM: The aesthetic of your photographs is characterised by a sombre and cold colour palette. It seems that you have a special connection to the cold seasons; and you also have a great grasp over the “winter of the soul”. There is a quote by Andrew Wyeth saying “I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it-the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it—the whole story doesn’t show.” This epitomises the enigmatic mood and alluring aesthetic of your photographs as well. Do you feel more inspired during the cold seasons since they are often associated with the emotions underlying your work and do you have a special bond to your birth month?

ND: Yes, I’m a child of November, a child of Autumn. Fall is my favorite season, at this time all my feelings are aggravated, my dreams become more bizarre, I create a lot of photographs, music, poetry, needlework. Also I keep a diary every fall – I call it “The diary of wilting”. Every day I write my thoughts and add some leaves and plants filled with autumn colors and a foreboding of death. Autumn nature fully reflects the landscapes of my soul.
As for winter, it depresses me. I don’t like this white cold world. And I can’t sleep – insomnia visits me. However, most of my music is composed on winter nights.

DM: Do you think your photography is influenced by your native Russian roots and do you feel any emotional connection to your land?

ND: Perhaps the only connection with the Russian mentality that I feel is “Russian toska” – it’s ache of soul, longing with nothing to long for. This feeling is reflected in my works.
I’d call myself a resident of the universe. For me, the homeland is not a city or country, it’s a planet, its forests, fields, rivers, sky. I really love the nature that surrounds me, but I know that I’d also love nature in other parts of the world.

DM: Do the characters in your photographs embody parts of your identity, or are they vivid aspects of your imagination, inspired by the world around you or fiction? How do you breathe life into them?

ND: My characters are woven from fragments of my personality, fiction and dreams. They seem to live in parallel reality and sometimes come to visit me in a dream or wake up in the subconscious.

DM: Some of your projects are eclectic: you create music, poetry, and video art, interweaving these creative threads to give birth to beautiful and evocative atmospheric pieces. Describe your creative process as a multimedia artist.

ND: It is always very difficult for me to describe this process. Because all this happens mostly spontaneously, in a fit of inspiration. I don’t have any clear structure, plan. Sometimes I feel the need to supplement my visual creativity with music, poetry and I just do it.

DM: Do you make a living entirely out of your art or do you have any other side occupations?

ND: Art is my only source of income.

DM: Some of your visual stories—both photographs and videos—unfold like dream fragments, often of an unsettling nature. Your art gives the impression of resurrecting elements from the unconscious mind—repressed fantasies, desires, and imagery. Is the visual symbolism borrowed from your own dreams, or nightmares?

ND: Yes, I write in my diary all interesting dreams and nightmares, and then use this material for my art. Dreams really inspire me to work.

DM: Do you believe in the concept of Soul as something separate from the body, and in the immortality of the soul? Some of your photographs have a macabre aspect, do thoughts of death scare and sadden you or do you embrace mortality?

ND: I’m not sure what I believe. It seems to me that the soul exists, but I don’t believe in immortality. It seems to me that death is a black void that will envelop us. It is like a dead dream, without images and visions, when you simply plunge into nothing.
Death does not scare me. Especially my death. I have long accepted and realised the fact of my mortality, and I’m fine with that. I would not want to live forever, to be honest. But the pain of losing close to me creatures—people or animals—scares me.

DM: Your Schizophrenia, your musical project, is such a moody, hypnotising piece of art. On the one hand, as we don’t have an understanding of Russian, we think we would like to hear an English version; on the other hand, Russian is such a beautiful-sounding language, it seems it contributes to the lyricism and the compelling, atmospheric nature of the project. Have you ever thought of creating English versions of your musical poems?

ND: The Russian language allows me to express everything that I feel, because of it I use it more often in my project. For my listeners, I also add translations (especially on Instagram) so that they can understand what this song or dark tale is about.
I also have poems and songs in English. For example:
Inner Demon
Late lamented
Fall asleep
We are dying with falling leaves
The lyrical fatigue

And in the near future I plan to release a book with translations of my poems and dark tales.

DM: What made you decide to go for the title, “Your Schizophrenia”?
ND: Partly it is connected with the person (schizophrenic) I knew and who influenced me in a certain period of my life.
Schizophrenia also includes hearing voices, delusions, social withdrawal. Your Schizophrenia is a character living in my subconscious, as if I transmit her thoughts, whispers, tunes, fears and sorrows.

DM: Do you believe an artist has to face the darker side of life and of the mind, being guided by chaos, darkness, and/or sorrow, in order to create valuable art, or can worthwhile art be generated by a peaceful mind, or in peaceful moments infused with happiness too?

ND: I think that art can be born by darkness and chaos, but also in peaceful moments. I think that each of the emotions can be used as inspiration for poems, paintings, photographs, music. Creativity is multifaceted. What is more important here is what inspires You, makes You feel. It all depends on preferences as well. In my soul, dark art and painful beauty find a greater response. It is like that strange feeling before the storm, when the breath stops and the heart beats so loudly…

  • Natalia Drepina
  • Natalia Drepina
  • Natalia Drepina

Images © Natalia Drepina

Links:
https://www.facebook.com/NataliaDrepinaPhotography/
https://www.deviantart.com/nataliadrepina/gallery
https://yourschizophrenia.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.instagram.com/yourschizophrenia

John Santerineross – Neo-Symbolist Photographer

Posted on by Diana Marin

John Santerineross, considered a neo-symbolist photographer, creates uncanny, sinister, erotic imagery whilst focusing on conveying moods and evoking states of mind- an approach favoured by the symbolists in art in general. Neosymbolism explores mystical, emotional, spiritual, as well as sensual themes, the unconscious mind and dreams, metamorphoses of good and evil, the connection between image and soul, employing private and universal symbols. John Santerineross’ photographs incorporate religious symbolism and iconography, mixed with eroticism, occultism, horror, and a hint of pain; his subversive combination of the sacred and the profane has attracted both admiration and criticism. Whilst in some photography magazines he has been called “the world leading Neo-symbolist artist“, Catholic League President William A. Donohue describes Santerineross’ as a nihilist and one of the “artistic assassins and moral anarchists who want to artistically assassinate Christianity, especially Catholicism“. Santerineross does not confirm or deny any statements or interpretations due to his belief that art should appeal to each viewer on a personal level; that they should define his art for themselves rather than being limited by an explanation, another view also held by the early symbolists.
The Symbolist manifesto (1886, by Jean Moréas) emphasises:
“Truth in subjective experience. Truth in apparent chaos and insanity. Truth in excess and extravagance. The risk of what was once rebellious to become conformist.”

John Santerineross’ collections feature unsettling erotic imagery, dream symbolism, and the nightmarish aspects of the human psyche, as he delves into the dark recesses of the mind where sado-masochistic fantasies and decadent narratives are generated. Psychoanalytically informed, he has the awareness that many of our repressions and fears are rooted in childhood trauma, which draws the obscure map of our unconscious mind and desires. The uncanny is linked to repressed ideas about childhood, which are alienated via repression and sometimes return to us through strangely familiar moments, through a sentence, a word, or a piece of art that can pierce through the state of repression and bring back certain feelings, wishes, and thoughts originating in childhood. It seems that his photographs allegorically reflect and encapsulate the dimension of desire and repression.

Website: www.santerineross.com

Katie Eleanor: a ghostly world inhabited by ethereal, marble-like beings

Posted on by Diana Marin

Katie Eleanor is a London-based contemporary fine art photographer and Photographic Arts Graduate from the University of Westminster. Inspired by marble sculptures, the sculptural nature of Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s artworks, as well as scenes and characters from myths and from the artist’s fictional world, artistic memory, or, as she evocatively refers to it, the museum of her mind, “The Sialia Marbles” exhibition features hand-coloured photographic prints depicting ethereal beings frozen in time, marble-like, sometimes angelic-looking, other times ghostly. The uncanny dimension of her artworks stems from the dichotomous interplay between liveliness and death, between the ephemeral and the immortal qualities of her art; the rigidity and physical longevity of marble statues and the fluidity and ephemerality of the human performer; the deathlike stillness and the implication of physical and emotional movement. The beings depicted are also characterised by the archetypal (sentient-inanimate) ambiguity belonging to the Uncanny Valley.

The tableaux of Katie Eleanor allude to religious iconography and mythology art, with some subjects appearing to be solemn, others dramatic, involved in intense narratives. The veiled, white, diaphanous subjects portrayed are reminiscent of spirit photography, which amplifies the uncanny effect. It’s as if we are waiting for the motionless inhabitants of these unknown worlds to transcend the parameters of their existence within art; waiting for them to move towards the edge of the frame or fade away, for their veils to slip and reveal a change in expression, for their eyes to meet ours or glow. At the same time, the resemblance with statues (thus with something inanimate) makes this expectation perplexing.

The process behind the images includes the ritual of painting the models, performing a scene, the post-production process of hand colouring and enhancing the texture of the black and white analogue photographs. “Sialia” is the scientific name for bluebird – which Katie mentions is her alter ego, and the choice to include the word ‘marbles’ in the series title is congruent with her museum without walls parallel- a collection of uncanny human statues from her imaginary museum. The use of analogue photography and old film techniques brings uniqueness to the artworks; the physical, haptic quality of her work makes it more memorable and evocative, taking us on a mental trip through photographic art practices and through history, bringing back cultural artefacts and the sensory, magical properties of photography belonging to the pre-digital age. In more ways than one, Katie Eleanour’s photographs transcend temporality, having a hauntological dimension.

“I love tableaux vivants and creating intense, ambiguous scenarios with my performers. Angels are found in so much religious and historical visual culture, so they are familiar. They also symbolise protection, particularly when the series is viewed as a whole. I am not a particularly religious person, but I believe in sanctuary. My brain and my imagination are my sanctuary, and that is something I associate with these solemn spaces. It’s all creating a sanctuary for the viewer to inhabit, a sense of stillness and introspection.” – Katie Eleanor, Image Journal interview, 2019

Among the figures depicted in her work, you can find Saint Lucy and Daphne. After seeing a painting of Saint Lucy by Francesco Del Cossa, displayed at the National Gallery, the artist reveals:

“I was struck by the contrast between the brutality of her story and this ornate, delicate, almost whimsical rendering. In my version, the bandages over her eyes are significant, as I find the eyes of sculptures particularly haunting and vacant. This piece is a kind of homage to an amazing character in history.” – Katie Eleanor, Image Journal interview, 2019

“The Sialia Marbles” collection is on show at MMX Gallery until 15 February 2020

Diana Marin – Uncanny

Posted on by Diana Marin

Diana Marin’s photographic poem revolves around the uncanny connection between two women and the ambiguous intersection of separate timelines. The poetic video incorporates a beautiful collection of painterly photographs depicting a process of sisterly bonding in nature. As the visual narrative unfolds, the connection between the two enigmatic characters grows to be stronger and more intimate. The enticing imagery is accompanied by a haunting, atmospheric, emotional piano melody and a monologue filled with lyricism. The natural landscape is infused with echoes from the past, whilst the two characters can be found gracefully running through idyllic fields, like diaphanous nymphs. The lines between life and death, the natural and the unnatural, reality and imagination are blurred, whilst the woman coming from another era becomes more than a ghostly materialisation of the past and the ineffable bond between the two crosses into tactile, sisterly intimacy. The eerie anachronistic presence is initially shown in cinematic fragments, revealing herself in parts, whilst reaching out from beyond the grave, trying to escape the confines of time. Their first encounter under the blossoming tree is a brief visual reflection of their indescribable link: the elusive ghost of the past is closely identified with her surroundings, particularly the flowers, merging with them in a dreamlike haze. Later on, when they start inhabiting the geographical areas of her memory, she is still difficult to reach.

Concept: A woman from the past reaches out to a contemporary girl, sharing the story of her life in fragments and by guiding the girl on a path of re-living her past sensory experiences. Her tragic fear is that of memories vanishing, of losing traces of her significant other’s existence after his death, and at the same time, of being forgotten. Janey follows the traces of this 50’s apparition who transcends temporality, and the connection between them grows as their selves start merging.

Models: Zoey Li & Yan Shi

Black and white-

Colour-

Mira Nedyalkova’s Underwater Photography

Posted on by Diana Marin

A selection of artworks from the stunning uncanny underwater photography collection by Bulgarian visual artist and fine art photographer Mira Nedyalkova.

 

 

Mira’s work depicts the beautiful facets of pain and sadness in fluid forms, whilst linking water with sensuality and exploring erotic and emotional themes.

Water symbolism always makes us think of regeneration, purification, and catharsis – a reflection of the beginning and the end. Mira emphasises the dual dimension of water, symbolising sin and purity, as well as pleasure and innocence. The aquatic element has both generative and destructive powers; it can be life-giving and apocalyptic. Her models are depicted as otherworldly beings, seemingly frail, yet also dark and enigmatic. Water is also the essential element contributing to the surreal aesthetic of the pictures, since it changes the light, colour, and shapes captured in unexpected ways.

Mira Nedyalkova is not interested in pure photography – as opposed to many photographers who praise raw analogue photographs for capturing unaltered moments, she recognises the creative and transformative power of post-processing and digital editing as a way of enriching photography, of creating something new, conveying an emotion, and telling a story. As a former painter, she now sees digital editing as a way of getting closer to painting again.

 

Like many artists, Mira believes emotion is an essential part of a remarkable piece of art. Her view is epitomised in her stunning, memorable photographs, often depicting expressive, intense characters found in captivity. Other recurring characteristics of her artistic vision are a preference for nudity, the eerie beauty of nature, enigmatic, fragile-looking animals, and subtle sexuality.

   

Laura Makabresku’s Dark, Uncanny Fairy Tales

Posted on by Diana Marin
Uncanny Portrait Crow Eye

Polish self-taught fine art photographer Kamila Kansy, known as Laura Makabresku, draws inspiration from her deep, intimate connection to her native land – which she perceives as a mysterious realm of sinister fairy tales, in order to design a tragic world revolving around death, obscure eroticism, suffering, and human frailty. The suggestive name of her artistic identity conjures up the darkness portrayed in her haunting photographs which seem to reflect the Freudian uncanny through their eerie and strangely familiar quality.

Stepping away from digital cameras, she embraces the analogue practice with a soft painterly style with dark undertones. To create a gloomy, glacial, and morbid atmosphere, the colours used are often desaturated dark blue and green and the photographs are intentionally underexposed. Some photographs adopt the technique of superimposition to achieve a ghostly aesthetic and induce the impression that there is always something morbid looming within the frame – a dormant presence about to be unleashed.

  • icy portrait fox
  • snowy portrait fox

The distinctive imagery depicting Laura Makabresku’s artistic world can be compared to a dream: it has multiple layers, inviting the observer to begin an internal exploration. Her pictures should not only be admired aesthetically, but also felt from within. The shots are like collections of impulses, raw emotions, objects filled with hidden symbolism displayed in a beautifully chaotic, surreal manner which often involves strikingly unexpected combinations of elements such as dead animals, naked bodies, blood, knives, ants amplified in size, ravens pictured indoors, and human bodies with animal masks. The uncanny is ever present in this artistic realm: from dead birds coming out of the mouth of a woman collapsed on the autumnal earth, a naked body covered in moss, guarded by a mysterious fox, a sorrowful girl’s languid body enveloped by a goat’s hide, a pensive woman touching a bowl filled with blood, upon which a little bird rests, a touching portrait of a girl embracing a fox in a glass coffin, eyes covered by pressed flowers or positioned dangerously close to a raven. All of her entrancing visual creations are filled with lyricism. In addition to these transparent motifs and compositions, the uncanny also lies in the homely atmosphere of the photographs, as well as the strange aesthetic quality reminiscent of macabre fairy tales.

Influenced by Francesca Woodman, her black and white portraits of the naked female body convey a duality between the calm, beautiful, graceful vulnerability and simplicity of the nude body sight and the undertones of death, darkness, emptiness, isolation, and dark sexuality. Through self-portraits, she embraces her fears and anguish and explores themes like autopsy, witchcraft, love, and a deep connection with animals, mortality, and the evil that lurks within her. The universe she creates makes the viewers look within and be inspired to embrace their own dark instincts and fantasies.

Diana Marin – Requiem for the Aesthete / Uncanny Photographic Poem

Posted on by Diana Marin

Diana Marin’s photographic project, Requiem for the Awakening, is a postmodern audio-visual trip, visual poetry constructed primarily from still photographs, a few moving image moments, and piercing, post-modernist monologue. Her activity included single-handedly editing, photographing, filming, as well as recording sound and voice-over to crystallise a concept that was inspired by her own dream experience. One morning in her previous home city, during a time when days were seamlessly, furtively blending into nights, Diana was immersed into a dream of an uncanny afterlife, in which the dimension of temporality became absurd. It was a special type of dream within a dream, evocatively described through the voice-over in her Requiem.

The fantasy-style digital manipulation is present throughout many images, with some particularly memorable ones featuring surreal compositions: the stormy skies surrounding the woman’s body embraced by tree branches, the woman with a grandiose pose standing behind what looks like a glass case followed by a shot of the graves with a similar layout, the Gothic images of Lilith guarded by her shadow, the elegant yet decaying decor in which she finds herself in the last tableaux.

Each “chapter” of the story contains conscious literary, artistic, photographic, philosophical, and cinematic allusions and influences in its depiction. The prologue, describing an ambiguous post-mortem state, summons up scenarios of the after life, whilst the strange connection the protagonist – as a disembodied presence traversing the ether- has with her still living brother has an element of unreality to it, and is partly rooted in occultism and the concept of astral plane and astral shells. Visually, the prologue is constructed from digitally altered photographs, created through the technique of digital painting, merging visuals, and adding layers. The first chapter, in which she re-learns how to live, has been inspired by The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and philosophical contemplation, particularly existentialism and the sense of disorientation characteristic of existential angst. It has a soft, aesthetically pleasing photographic style, somewhat in contrast to the eerie atmosphere and tension. The narrative style and stream-of-consciousness monologue of the second chapter carries echoes of Samuel Beckett’s Not I, combined with dark visuals directly pointing at German Expressionist cinema and Gothic films. The third chapter depicts the act of seeking harmony and purpose in the sanctuary of nature, the shots resembling idyllic paintings before the aesthetic switches to sombre and sinister and the mood becomes ominous once again, which leads us to the fourth and final chapter. In this final collection of photographs, the natural is replaced by the artificial and decaying decor. The atmosphere recalls the debauchery and aesthetic focus of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as being a feminine, photographic re-interpretation of the artificiality of Des Esseintes’ life from Huysmans’ À rebours. The mise-en-scene includes paintings, statues, bottles of wine, female figurines, Gothic fashion items, jewellery boxes, and other aesthetic objects. These painterly photographs reveal the life of an eccentric, solitary aesthete, slowly turning into a still life painting.

A brief description of the concept and a few photographic stills:

Prologue – Purgatory: Lilith lives through a centuries-long dream that she believes is the afterlife. She finds herself in a liminal space, with only one connection to the real world to keep her sane, until everything eventually proves to be designed by her mind.

Chapter I – The awakening: Lilith awakens from the dream and tries to re-learn how to live.

Chapter II – Anxiety: She cannot seem to be able to adjust to life once again. In a stream of consciousness, she re-lives epiphanies from her childhood when she gained acute awareness of her ephemeral condition

Chapter III – Nature escapism: Lilith thinks her environment is a cage, and decides to seek refuge in nature, only to realise she is a living cage. The outer world becomes a reflection of her inner world.

Chapter IV – Refuge in art: The girl turns away from nature and towards the artificial, and eventually, towards art. She reconciles with the idea of death through art, when she becomes art.

Model: Rosie Cochrane

The voice-over:

“On the 19th of July Lilith drifted away from everything that she knew and acquired a post-mortem insight into the world, after the bomb explosion that shattered the hearts of her relatives. She likes to think that she can still reach out to the closest person she knew while alive. Her brother, who was also the first one to find out about her death.
My consciousness is spread across an indefinite area of pulsating matter. I could not tell you whether I’m on another planet, wandering in the ether or lost in my own mind. I can tell you this is neither heaven nor hell. I have been here for a very long time, I couldn’t tell you how long, perhaps years, perhaps centuries
My sanity has relied on this inexplicable connection.
When I realised I had died, although sad, I was also relieved, that I still existed somewhere, even in this confusing state. I never believed in life after death, although I wished for it, as nothingness always frightened me. After a while however, existing like this became wearying.
How can I ever trust my mind and my world again now that I’ve wandered away from reality for what felt like hundreds of years. I’ve been awake for a few days trying to make sense of what happened to me. I can’t fully remember life before the explosion, and my body is finding it very hard to readjust to normality.
Words, voices, spiders crawling on the wall, abnormal shadows with a hundred legs, waiting, waiting waiting for the right moment so they could choke me…I would then be one with the shadows. I used to love the darkness as a kid, wandering in gardens after midnight, sneaking out of the house through that small window; making sure everyone was asleep to avoid punishments. The garden…looking at the stars, knowing from a young age that what I was seeing in the sky may have died a long time ago. Those were astral traces, spectres of something that once was; I wanted to exist I wanted to exist beyond time, beyond space, I wanted to see the beginning of the world and the end of the world at the same time…to understand it. To understand my urge for creation and destruction.
I have to get out of here. everything around me pulsates and feels like it’s about to explode, my heart jumps with every turn. I fear my nightmare is going to replace reality.”

Diana’s Website: dianamarin.com