Art Rec: Hold My Heart

[chapbook.livejournal.com]

Title: Hold My Heart
Artist: unicornempire
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Verse: Sherlock BBC
Artist's summary: Song: "Arms" by Christina Perri
This painting is very much a moment rather than a particular point in time. As many of my other paintings have been showing a kind of feeling of a time period this is very specific to the point in the books at Reichenbach falls and/or the Pool scene in The Great Game, as I feel they are in a lot of ways 'the same scene'. It ties heavily into the other paintings using the same symbolism to fit it together along with a matching color scheme, but I believe the outcome is up to the viewer. I personally like to see it as a wound that will be recovered from, which is why I did not make their expressions very serious or upset.

Reccer's comments: I love symbolism in art, so it's no surprise to me that I enjoy the work of the Sherlock fanartist that I associate most strongly with symbolism. Like Northern Renaissance paintings (for example, Peter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs), her artwork can be packed with symbols. Some are easy to read, such as the waterfall, which refers to Sherlock's Fall (note that this was created before Season Two came out). Others may require the reader to look to unicornempire's other Sherlock paintings and to use their knowledge of the series to come up with a possible interpretation. The artist herself is also very willing to discuss the meaning she attributes to the content of her works (while understanding the importance of the viewer in analyzing visual art). From her we learn that the arrow that wounds and binds John and Sherlock demonstrates the negative and positive results of their brushes with danger.

Unicornempire's non-realistic style encourages the viewer to interpret her pieces as commenting on the characters and their relationships as a whole, rather than as illustrations of one concrete moment in the series. This gives her art a quality of paradoxical timelessness, the sense that the characters are "outside time" as well as grounded in a particular reality (the BBC series in this case). The juxtaposition of day and night, the halo (lit by the great intellect within), and the serene expressions of the characters all suggest that Sherlock and John will survive their trials and live on, even when their physical bodies suffer and die.