Fear

Just recently, I watched American Horror Story: Cult which, for the first few episodes, explored fears such as coulrophobia, haemophobia and trypophobia. It was because of this season that I became interested in trypophobia specifically, which through the show, I discovered to have. Ever since the show introduced the phobia to me I became more interested in it ending myself up with questions such as “why do some people have it?”, “is it evolutionary?” and “why are clusters of holes disgusting?”. As I become more and more interested in this particular phobia, I started becoming more interested into looking more into this fear and because of that I’m thinking about doing something on canvas about phobias. From what I’m trying to finish at the moment, I feel like I want to do portraits for this series as well (yes! a SERIES, I’m planning to do my first series); portraits of allegorical representations of either my own phobias or different phobias that different people have. The idea is to portray these allegorical figures as saints or holy figures to creates a sense of dichotomy between comfort and fear, attraction and disgust, holiness and ungodliness, etc. Since I grew up with Christian Catholic images, I could not help but use these as one of my inspirations. I’m still in the middle of carrying that inspiration even after my amazing time at Brookes. Since leaving the university, I really began embracing this obsession I have with Christian images which during my childhood was the last time when it was intense; as a teenage it gradually died down…actually…it’s more of it became dormant. Nevertheless, it resurfaced and here I am now obsessing again but this time embracing it.