Symbolism

• Symbolism is defined as 'an artistic and poetic movement or style using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions, and states of mind.’
• It originated in the late 1800s in France, Belgium and Russia and specifically the aesthetic was developed in the 1860s and 1870s by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.
• Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly.
• Symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography, but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.
• Usually a symbol is a simplified image that, because of certain associations in a viewer’s mind, represents a more complex idea or system.
• Common symbols:
• Air symbolises activity, masculinity, creativity, breath, light, freedom, liberty, and movement.
• Ascent indicates height, transcendence, inward journeying, and increasing intensity.
• Centring depicts thought, unity, timelessness, spacelessness, paradise, the Creator, infinity, and neutralising opposites.
• The cross portrays the tree of life, axis of the world, ladder, struggle, martyrdom, and orientation in space.
• The dark illustrates the time before existence, chaos, and the shadow world.
• Descent shows unconsciousness, potentialities of being, and animal nature.
• Duality suggests opposites, complements, and pairing.
• The earth suggests femininity, receptiveness, solidity, and mother.
• An eye illustrates understanding, intelligence, the sacred fire, and creativeness.
• Fire represents the ability to transform, love, life, health, control, spiritual energy, regeneration, the sun, God, and passion.
• Food stuffs represent abundance and thanksgiving.
• A lake represents mystery, depth, and unconsciousness.
• Light stands for the spirit, morality, creative force, the direction East, and spiritual thought.
• The moon presents the feminine and fruitfulness.
• Mountains demonstrate height, mass, loftiness, the centre of the world, ambition, and goals.
• The sun indicates the hero, knowledge, the divine, fire, creative and life forces, brightness, splendour, awakening, healing, and wholeness.
• Unity signifies spirit, oneness, wholeness, centring, transcendence, harmony, revelation, supreme power, completeness in itself, light, and the divinity.
• Water denotes feminine qualities, life, and the flow of the cycles of life.