Mourning and Melancholia
oil on canvas
48" x 36"
$2,000
Mourning and Melancholia is part of a series of paintings that explore how we shape and experience the world around us through our individual psychologies and what happens when those psychologies become removed from a healthy state. Between our minds and the universe around us is a filter of perception created by our culture, experiences, and psychobiology. If our realities are built on our perceptions, then the world of the majorly depressed individual really is grey and sad and dark. There really is no hope in sight and the reality around them really isn’t worth living in. An attempt to explore and visualize such an existence is Mourning and Melancholi, a reference to Freud’s 1917 publication on depression. Inspiration for this piece was drawn from a collection of personal experiences and the experiences of people I’ve become close to. In this painting, the archetype of a house/room is used as a symbol for the brain and the mind. The degradation of the figure’s head represents the dissolution of self-identity and worth in the sufferers of major depression. The figure’s existence is presented as something painful and the pose is meant to express the figure’s desire to leave that existence and become nothing.