Death

This famous watercolor was created by Hugo Simberg, in 1896. It’s a classic piece of symbolism; the work reflects Simberg’s thoughts on death. His personal thoughts of the scene were that, the garden of death depicts a place where the souls must go before they can enter heaven, purgatory.
This picture is clear in its mean and still has a sombre and dark mood, for example these skeletons caring for the flowers as if they were loved ones. Like the middle character holding the flower tight to his chest, like a child, it gives you the impression of a place where time, life and reality have no meaning or matter, it’s a disturbing idea. When I look at this I see the love the dead had before is used on the garden, nurturing it with the love they may have forgotten in their lives. And even that maybe how well they look after the plans will affect their next life.
This is felling of waiting and isolation is achieved extremely well by subject matter and the materials used, for example the choice of water colours and gouache, the mixture achieved a off-yellow tint to the whole painting, making the image more surreal and dark. This also created great contrast to the deep black of the figures of death; this is why I believe he used these materials. It’s a simple yet very effective method.

MY REACTION

This is my reaction to the piece above, as you can see I have drawn influence from
the striking contrast. I drew with a fine pen, my design, and then scanned it into Photoshop. From there I use Photoshop to create the strong yellow tint, and to darken the black capes. This created a great effect. I also chose to use the very flat imagery like in Simberg’s as I feel this makes the image “lifeless”, which I felt appropriate.