"Lucyfer", Franz Von Stuck, 1890, Oil on canvas

I don't rememeber where excatly did I see this piece for the very first time, I believe that I watched a youtube video analysing it. Despite that, I distinctly remember getting jumpscared by it. The man in the painting looks so scary and unnatural, the room being dark, him doing this very strange pose, looking at the viewer dead in the eye, and him having yellow eyes and when you look really closely at them you can see a little red dot in his pupils, and him being naked. Everything about this piece makes it such an effective horror piece, and that's not even the main attraction. The whole point is that the man has black wings on his back, but you can only barely see them with the lighting and mark-making. I just think that the concept is cool and the execution even better, this is honsetly one of the first things that comes into my mind when someone asks what paintings I like. Art is usually valued more on the emotions it evokes, so I suppose the fact that I remember what I felt when I first looked at it and not how I first saw it makes it really special.

"At The Seashore", Anna Bilińska, 1886, Oil on canvas

I discovered this painting in a book that details the lives and work of various Polish female artists, this was one of the pieces highlighted and analysed in the first sections about Anna Bilińska. The painting itself is already beautiful and has this melancholy yet bittersweet atmosphere, but its the backstory is what makes it for me. The artist made it in a horrible period of her life, where she was depressed and had to accept that she might never have a child despite wanting to be a mother. The book's author interpreted the imagery of a woman looking at a small child that is looking at the horizon as allusion to the artist's situation. The atmosphere is so melancholy to show that this isn't a happy moment for the mother. I think that this painting is special because of the state it is in. The horizon line of the sea doesn't match up and the ground doesn't have much detail and it just doesn't seem to be finished. I don't like assuming things about others, but I feel that the state of the painting reflects the mental state of the artist, like she couldn't finish and polish it due to depression. I feel really bad for Blińska and wish she didn' went through all that pain, I just feel that despite that she was able to make somehting beautiful.