Eden Gallery - Fine Artist SN's Case for Aesthetics
Meet the artist SN. Represented by Eden Gallery, he is widely known for his breathtaking charcoal drawings and photographs of women and animals, which he then mounts with butterflies. The resulting creation is a bright and colorful one, contrasted with a black & white background
SN is an imaginative artist who explores his ever-changing ideas about the world in mixed media artworks, primarily of nature and fantastical subjects. Since he was young, he has had an obsession with the magic of the natural world, which has propelled him to convey this over many years in his body of works. He quotes his inspirations as “heavy metal, the music, and the wild.” In his art, SN places emphasis on aesthetics and beauty, first and foremost. “I’m not making anything that’s just aesthetic without meaning, but first I choose the aesthetic. It’s like that for me for music also, I listen first to the music not to the lyrics. I think art is - first and foremost - aesthetic.”
In his youth, at the mere age of 12, he began as a photographer, documenting the world around him as he took it in with wide eyes. His dream was to photograph for National Geographic; until he was 20, his affinity for wild landscapes and animals led him to exclusively photograph birds of prey.
After achieving every artist’s dream of having one of his photographs displayed in an exhibition in London, he realized how much enjoyment he derived from pursuing art as a full time profession and passion project. As time progressed, photography, however, began to feel dull and limiting, and slowly he started to experiment with other media. He began using oil and acrylic paints, and has continued to find it much more meaningful than being a photographer. For SN, becoming a painter made him feel like a true artist, because in the art of painting, the artist creates something from nothing. In his own words, “I feel very secure with a brush in my hands.” After this transition into painting, he still continued to expand his methods of expression by creating pencil and charcoal drawings and layering butterflies on top, creating mixed media artworks.
As a way to continue incorporating nature in his art in inventive ways over time, he started exploring butterflies as their own form of “paint” on the canvas. “I get so excited by butterflies. They are so beautiful, there’s no color like that. I think it was a result of not using a paintbrush, a new way to make a painting colorful. They’re painted with butterflies.” He uses butterflies to decorate his usual human subjects in nature, as well as decorating symbols such as hearts and skulls with different colored butterflies as well, seen in “Heart With Wings - True Love,” and “The Golden Skull.”
SN has explored juxtaposing themes in his works, such as life and death and darkness and light. His main contradictory theme has been beauty: there is a quote decorating several of his works, “beauty breaks my heart,” which is his way of expressing how his love for beauty also evokes feelings of helplessness and sadness in him.
His fascination with beauty is evident in the subjects of his artworks: he often depicts supermodels against a backdrop of nature, alongside wild animals. “It’s not necessarily that these are my favorite icons. Of course I love them and respect them, but I choose them when they fit my imagination. When I’m choosing icons, it’s much more from the outside than the inside.” In “The Hunter and the White Horse,” he depicts a minimally clothed woman decorated in butterflies as a dress. While she represents beauty, along with the nature behind her, the white horse accompanying her, and the butterflies mounted on her body, she is also holding a rifle. This is one of many works where the viewer is invited to think critically about the fine line between beauty and darkness, or even between life and death.
He loves to constantly feel excited and stimulated, and becoming a fine artist has satisfied this yearning for passion that has dominated his internal world. SN is exclusively represented by the internationally acclaimed Eden Gallery. His works are on display in all Eden Gallery locations worldwide.