a View on Melancholy

 Hello!

     I was always interested in theories concerning temperaments... I haven't probably mentioned it but this interest influenced my way of portraying personifications of the Four Seasons. I couldn't help but assign each of them to respective humours like sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. Today I would like to focus on the last one of them because showing a view on Melancholy belonged to one of my aims.

So let's start with the earliest sketches with the ideas for Melancholy's portrayal.

I chose to show the allegory of Melancholy as a tired, worried and thoughtful woman. Next I draw her on paper. Firstly I wanted to use a black pen for outlines but I've changed my mind.

Yeah, I chose crayons to distinguish face and arm (drawing a hand was as always a kind of a special torture). And then - after I made some tinting, I took scissors and cut out hair and blouse's spaces. You see, from the very beginning I planned this particular view on Melancholy as a collage! 

To be honest, firstly I've just wanted to make a drawing of a worried lady, distinguish her contours by pen (I remember that I was thinking about using blue pastels in this work) and then glued a blue crêpe paper on an allegory... 

But I haven't considered this as a sufficient method.

I reminisced a music video to Kalafina's song far on the water - especially those moments with city landscape layered on band members' silhouettes. 

It looks so inspiring! 

So I prepared a cardboard and old newspapers. I glued pieces of culture (a cinema and a theatre were involved) and some existentially sounding headlines to cardboard. I used a few crayons again and then draw a spider web with pens.

I don't like spiders but in this case I found a presence of a spider web as something necessary. It's a combination of a reference and a symbol. A reference to Caspar David Friedrich's woodcut on paper (link). A symbol of a dark side of melancholy because some thoughts can be really disturbing and toxic - especially if you plunge into them for too long. 

Above you could see a version before I used a blue crêpe paper. Maybe you're interested why did I chose a blue colour? The reason is quite simple - this particular colour is associated with Melancholy.

And finally - below there's an effect of my experiments.

Melancholy, collage, 21 x 14,5 cm.

And that's all. I hope you haven't been disturbed by boredom during this long post.

My next aim will be... 

an illustration to Dmitri Shostakovich's Waltz no. 2

As always - 

Have a Nice Day!

Edited: 23 I 2024