When people hear the phrase dark art, they often imagine something quite literal — something frightening, violent, or shocking. But for me, darkness in art has always been more subtle than that. It’s less about horror and more about honesty. A place where things are allowed to exist even if they’re not comfortable, not resolved, not easily explained.
I don’t create to disturb anyone. I create to feel. To process.
For me, dark art is about making space for emotions that don’t fit easily into everyday life — grief, silence, restraint, longing, shame, the heavy kind of beauty that lives in memory or imagination. I’ve never been interested in depicting pain for the sake of pain, but I do feel it’s important not to turn away from it.
In many ways, darkness is simply another kind of truth.
And like in the old fairy tales — the ones that existed before they were cleaned up and softened — there’s always a mix of beauty and fear. Growth and danger. Innocence and cruelty. These stories weren’t written just to entertain children; they were coded ways of passing down difficult knowledge — about how to survive, how to protect, how to feel, and how to carry pain without letting it become you.
That mix of softness and darkness — that’s the world I work in.
Take Silent Saints, for example. The upside-down flowers, the dark falling shapes, the quiet restraint in their mouths — they’re not meant to shock. They’re meant to show how even in an upside-down world, even when everything feels inverted, there’s still grace. Still presence. Still something almost holy in the stillness.
Or Soft Scream, which explores what it means to hold something inside — not because you want to, but because you don’t yet know how to release it.
Another recurring theme for me is vision — or the lack of it.
In Mirage, I play with the idea that eyes can be wide open and still not see. Sometimes what we truly need to understand isn’t visible at all — it’s sensed. It’s felt through intuition, through smell, sound, memory. The flowers in that piece are there for that reason — to represent all the other ways we understand the world.
A lot of my work draws from Slavic folklore, pagan myths, and old symbols — not as historical references, but as emotional tools. In these traditions, darkness wasn’t “bad.” It was necessary. The forest could swallow you, but it could also protect you. The wolf could kill you, or guide you. A rope could bind, or bless. That duality speaks deeply to me. In my piece FETISH, I use this kind of tension — where something sacred can also feel dangerous, and something restrictive can also feel ritualistic.
For me, painting is also a way of processing. Of holding the messy things. There’s a reason my subjects often have neutral or unreadable expressions. It’s not to push anyone away — it’s because sometimes when you’re feeling the most, your face doesn’t show it at all.
There’s also a softness that I try to keep alive in every piece.
Even when the themes are heavy, there’s always something small, something delicate — a flower, a glance, a fabric fold — that offers a kind of quiet hope. I believe that sensitivity, even when it’s fragile, survives. And that’s what I return to, again and again. The idea that something honest and kind can grow through the darkest soil.
My relationship with darkness is not about glorifying pain — it’s about acknowledging it, giving it shape, and then making space for beauty inside it.
Dark art, to me, is simply human art. It’s not afraid to stay in the places we usually rush past. It slows down. It listens. It remembers.
And through that process, it becomes something strangely peaceful.
