From The Depths: ThornyThoughts Artwork

The demons of your unconscious walk the earth and devour your unborn children. They emerge from the old dead willows, whose branches mimic serpents and thorns, your cold, brittle bones as you sleep and indulge in intoxicating habits, as you manifest your lustful desires, as you worship, as you ascend and as you rot.

It is a recurrent theme within underground arts to evoke and celebrate these demons. German-based illustrator Cynthia of ThornyThoughts Artwork has captivated these beings so beautifully, in the perfectly obscure, albeit enchanting way. Perhaps this is what has made her so popular as an underground artist; working with bands such as Urfaust (prominently), Carpe Noctem, Der Weg Einer Freiheit, Aosoth, Arvakh, Merrimack, Self-Inflicted Violence, Slumber, and Yhdarl. Not to mention her upcoming collaborations with Xasthur, Secrets Of The Moon, Witchslave, Atoma, Foscor, Ketzer, TotalSelfHatred, Trimonium, and Tsorer.

Cynthia’s creative process, in itself, seems to be a reflection of the images protrayed. Instead of adding a medium on top of a canvas, she creates these prolific pieces through the destructive process of etching lithographic plates. A previous interview sheds some light onto why she is so gravitated towards this method:

“It’s an attempt to turn negativity into productivity. To me it’s a way to process what’s gnarling and murmuring inside my head, and etching is the perfect technique to me since working with needles and acids is physical work as well, kind of violent…together with music on headphones, getting dirty in the studio…it’s a perfect nondestructive way of swimming in my drama for a while, haha!… and in the end it’s all banned into the metal, and I can kind of put it away.” (MAS)

This is perhaps a prime example of becoming the art you seek to create. We cannot experience our art without succumbing to its natural forces and influences, creating an environment for its essence to flourish. We cannot evolve nor produce anything of substance, in the artistic sense. Cynthia, obviously, certainly has.

Cynthia has recently been on a hiatus from the public eye and accepting new commissions, but if you want to learn more about her and her work, you can visit her page on Myspace, or check out her other mini-interviews on me and suicide and Muscial Warfare.