About the Artist

Sólas and Christina

Farphyni (a.k.a. Christina M.) is a self-taught artist, born on the 30th of May 1996, in Austria.
To keep her absolute artistic freedom, she decided to keep art as her hobby and studied biotechnology, following her insatiable curiosity. She got her bachelor degree in 2018 and her master degree in 2020. With the beginning of 2021 she started with her dissertation in the field of analytical chemistry.

Although being an artist that mainly draws and paints, Farphyni also designs and sews costumes and bags, weaves fabrics, creates leathercrafts and sculptures. Even 3D-art and -prints are part of her creation.
Regarding traditional art, Farphyni usually uses a various range of materials, such as oil paints, acrylics, pencils, inks, watercolours, ballpoint pens, markers and many more.

Farphyni is a symbolist and attempts to make the invisible visible, often under the guise of fantasy art.


About the Art

Fantasy is also the messenger of the unconscious. Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.”
Odilon Redon

What unites Farphynis artworks is the emphasis for depth psychology and the unconscious. The goal of her art is to make the invisible visible.

Symbolist art displays objects (symbols) that represents and communicates deeper ideas, thought processes and emotions through symbols and express the inner life. In a Symbolist artwork, everything is meaningful and often based on the imagination and fantasy. There is always a single, coherent idea that ties up all the strange symbols in one painting. Often dark and macabre themes of death and mortality are recurring in Symbolist dreams, a hallucinatory world of monsters and grotesque creatures as well as mythical and dreamlike figures, that sometimes serves as escape from reality, expressing personal dreams and visions through color, form, and composition.
The symbolic value or meaning of a work of art stemmed from the re-creation of emotional experiences in the viewer through color, line, and composition. Symbolism represents a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and the artist’s inner subjectivity.

Symbolists are often inspired by psychoanalysis, introspection and the subconscious, in order to portray the subjects’ inner life. The reason for that is that the majority of our self is unconscious. The unconsciousness is like an own world, which is as real and important for the individual life (and the personal individuation process) as the conscious, thinking world of the ego, but infinitely more profound and richer – full of symbols. The unconscious has a significant impact on emotions, moral and mental perceptions and social behaviour. Therefore the unconscious strongly influences our life because often we act through inner forces and not only because of external stimuli.
C. G. Jung (and others) already realized that a human receives a feeling of completeness and meaningfulness through a union of the consciousness with unconscious contents of the mind. In this way a human is able to reach their highest purpose: The complete realization of their individual self; Once all masks are dropped and all shadows (“other” sides of the ego) emerge. This may seem frightening or maybe even repellent to some people – the unconscious has always had an aura of mystic and mystery.

Farphyni’s creative work reflect emotions, thoughts and feelings and serves to make the invisible and unconscious visible, to affect the beholder emotionally and familiarize them with the hidden – whether it may appear terrifying and unsettling or enchanting and enriching. It is meant to cause a change in the beholder or serves as fuel for thoughts.
Ideas are suggested through symbols to emphasize the symbolism behind lines, colors and shapes, giving each a very own meaning. They can be partly surreal, partly abstract in means to express psychological truth.
Like Chirico wrote regarding the “Pittura Metafiscia”, every thing has two aspects: The ordinary, visible aspect and the ghostlike, metaphysical aspect. An artwork has to tell something, which is not visible in an outer appearance. Therefore, the transcendental, supernatural and mental is visualized: The second, secretive reality behind the visible, beyond the sensual experience.
Accordingly, the ghostlike aspect of things is visualized, a dreamlike transposition of reality, which emerges visionary from the unconscious. The ineffable, such as dreams and impalpable sensations, is given a form  – however a symbolic one due to the certainty that everything is subjective.

Therefore, the invisible is made visible.


About Farphyni

Farphyni isn’t only my artist’s name, but also refers to the personification of my creativity/art, a sort of Alter Ego, and an important part of my worldbuilding and storywriting: Farphyni Arka.
Over 10 years ago I drew her first reference sheet and every few years I updated it. Now, in 2020, she finally got a very detailed one, which also gives a bit of background information about her species and the related dimension.
Find the reference sheet here.