What are your thoughts on how I might lean further into Symbolism or Naturalism so as to develop a deeper and most authentic body of work?
This is a powerful moment of self-reflection—because the decision to lean further into either Symbolism or Naturalism can open different emotional and conceptual worlds. Both live in your work, but refining the focus of a series around one will give it greater clarity, depth, and cohesion. Here are paths you could take:
If You Lean Further into Symbolism:
Focus: Emotion, memory, metaphor, interiority, spiritual force
How to Develop a Strong Symbolist Series:
Let reality dissolve sooner. Begin with observation but allow it to vanish early. Deconstruct the body or landscape until only emotional architecture remains.
Work with personal archetypes. Develop recurring symbolic motifs: a single figure, a certain bird, an object from childhood, recurring color codes. Make them visual metaphors for larger themes (loss, silence, decay, protection).
Paint the unseen. Think of representing forces or histories that are invisible but ever-present: capitalism, entropy, grief, technological consciousness, ancestral memory.
Use distortion as voice. Let your brushwork, digital layering, and spatial logic behave more like dream or memory than fact. Consider color as psychic weather, not as optical truth.
Draw from literature or poetry. Use a line from Rilke, Celan, or Eliot as a trigger for a series. Let the work become a visual poem.
Symbolist Series Ideas:
The Rewritten Body – figures reshaped by memory, ideology, and time
After the Forest – landscapes infused with absence, history, or ecological haunting
Echoes from the Machine – portraits where AI, noise, or capitalism fracture human form
The Unnamed Season – color fields and environments tied to personal emotional states rather than real times of year
If You Lean Further into Naturalism:
Focus: Observation, structure, cause-and-effect, temporality, biology
How to Develop a Strong Naturalist Series:
Commit to close, extended observation. Spend time painting or photographing the same place or person at different times of day or season. Capture transformation slowly.
Explore materiality. Let your brush, pigment, and medium speak for the density of flesh, the weight of light, or the age of stone.
Anchor your themes in the physical. Rather than metaphor, show how environment, time, or society marks the body—scars, posture, decay, labor.
Let presence guide meaning. A figure staring, sitting, or resting carries its own psychological weight when rendered carefully and patiently. No need for symbols—just let being speak.
Use natural light as the organizing principle. Let it drive tone, palette, and atmosphere across a series.
Naturalist Series Ideas:
Studies in Solitude – intimate portraits of individuals in quiet, candid moments
Edge of Season – plein-air landscapes showing slow shifts in ecology or light
Conditions of Flesh – physical studies of aging, skin, musculature, and breath
Occupied Spaces – rooms, studios, or domestic corners rendered over time
Hybrid Option: Symbolist-Naturalist Dialectic
You’re in a rare position to explore both. If that calls to you:
Use the naturalist eye to collect your materials (photography, plein air sketches, anatomical studies)
Use the symbolist instinct to reconstruct them emotionally—through digital overlays, expressive brushwork, or formal abstraction
Let the tension itself be the subject: what is remembered vs. what is observed, what is felt vs. what is known
Would you like help crafting a concept around one of these directions? Or naming and framing a series that builds from your current work?