New Work: Oizys - the Personification of Misery

Detail of Oizys, Artist: Andrew Binder, 2024

Honestly, this image wasn't originally meant to be so...purple, but I decided to let the process go where it was taking me. I originally saw it as overwhelmingly blue, but it kept coming out a bit too drab, and so more and more magenta tones kept being added. Like my prior piece Man, Composition in Red and Blue, this is a bit of an experiment mixing digital watercolor in with elements of my usual process (with the digital watercolor taking the lead). I'm experimenting with this flattened, mysterious figure idea at the moment.

The title Oizys refers to an ancient Greek goddess, a lesser deity that personified misery, distress and suffering. As usual, I'm not concerned with being consistent with any traditional visual representations of this mythological figure. Rather, I use the title "Oizys" as an expressive conceptual device. A lot of my work represents what I'm feeling at the moment, or is a reflection of my feelings about what's going on in the world around me, etc. I wanted the figure to appear almost as a phantasm whose features were not clear or distinct, yet conveyed a feeling of sadness and foreboding. A harbinger of doom. “Oizys” seems a perfect reflection of the feelings that were going into this image when making it.