The World of Muserae - Celfaire - Ardel's Nightmare Theme

Nightmare Themed Paintings

Man reaching for drink in large river; current speeds as though to carry him away, surrounding vines and roots move at ready to bind/drown him. Said man resembles the artist himself. Realistic in form, subject caught at moment of highest tension, colors purposely 'washed out' so as to give the entire scene a bleaker mood.

A group of men, dressed in peasant clothes and carrying all manner of hand-held farm tools, stand around a pit of mud. All are exhausted, dirty. Their leader seems to be in the process of stepping back, one large boot stuck in the mud and a socked foot hovering over the swampland. His head is bowed hopelessly, and in his fist is a soft blue dress, or what remains of it; shreds of delicate fabric stained with blood. Beneath his large, impotent fist, the pit gurgles, consuming just as it is eager for more. Luminous insects provide most of the scene's light; one of the men holds a torch burned down to mere embers on a charred stick. While all appearances are fairly realistic, each detail is painted such that it appears filthy.

A gray sky casts gray light over gray boards of what used to be a house. Small dust storms begin to pick up what sparse vegetation still lives in the gray and dusty soil. Though enough study might suggest actual color present in the piece, the viewer sooner thinks it a trick of the eye, so total the scene's destruction.

An alien scene, this next; seemingly endless lengths of dusty wood, disappearing only under the cruel, coarse sands which coat this desert, are overlain with steel planks at unreliable intervals, running uniform only for some feet prior to disappearing. They cross only in the background of the painting, and begin to converge in the middle ground. The sky is painted in such vivid contrast to these tracks and this 'floor' that it could nauseate; green as an aurora, it seems still more unnatural in that its 'light' does not affect the ground beneath it. Within this sky there do, in fact, exist the ghosts of normal shapes--tables, chairs, glasses--but they are hard to immediately discern. Bone-dry plateaus allow the wind to kick around only tumbleweed; if any life exists in this place, it suffers.

So faint the color changes in this painting, one can begin to discern between sky and sea and shadow only by the flecks of white which set the water raging. Enough sunlight, keen enough eyes, and one begins to realize sea and sky are nearly equal in their blackness, but nevertheless there seems a third element--an immense shadow rises from the depths.

A painting of snow, ice and oppressive melancholy. Although sunlight gives the trees--their bare branches heavy with the same snow that coats the ground but does not fall--a certain sparkling beauty and the small homes in the distance are warm with firelight, one gets the impression that all is not ideal. Partially faded footprints track through the woods and toward the town, and seem never to end; whoever had walked through, he was not welcome in those warm homes.

A forest nearly black. No leaves grow, and everything is wet; even the grass drowns. Again what plants survive seem animate, ready to torment the silhouette which stretches across the moonlight in an appearance of terror, about to converge upon the lone soul. Although that moonlight shines strong, it seems to shed no useful light on the umbrous surroundings--instead it highlights the victim, the coward, and shows to all what might otherwise have remained blessedly shadowed.

The corner of a room, wood-planked in floor and wall; the sort of building it's in is uncertain, but the light source seems to be fire, rather than sun or moon. In this corner sits a handsome, black, upright piano. Dirtying otherwise immaculate keys is bright red blood, darker at its apparent source--between them. What can be seen of the floor is in a similar state. The walls, however, seem coated in blood that had already dried, black and flaking.

Again in a dark, living wood--one looking at the whole wall may see a trend--a man with long, thick gray hair tucks his face against a weeping, red-headed young girl in his arms. While love is thick enough in this scene that one would assume the two to be family, it seems as though that power was not quite strong enough; something tragic, something which would not 'get better' under this man's hands, had happened, and his failure had already occurred in completion.

Another depicts a nude woman tangled up in sheets, eyes tipped shut, thick and pretty lips hanging apart. A half-empty glass of water sat on the nightstand beside her. Sunlight filtered upon her person from what could only be assumed a window off to the right of the pictured area, unshown; that she looked asleep at such a time of day, and that the painting was sure that the glass was clearly visible, made it suspicious. . .not to mention his choosing to place it beside other paintings of less than merry depiction. Certainly, it could be a blonde taking a midday nap, the circumstances of her nudity left to their viewer. . .but why focus on the glass, and why was it in such darksome company?