The inevitable shadow of your soul... by Iliana Dokova

Artwork Description

Iliana depicts often the woman soul and body longing for love. She expressed the love that is painful, miserable, yet beautiful and inevitable.

Iliana’s expressive nude paintings are the core essence of her artistic life. Very emotional, sensual and tender, she loves to paint nude women figures. She describes the process of painting as very unique for her. She starts a painting and does not stop until it is finished. She has some art ardour and passion for her paintings and sits for many hours until the final stroke of the painting touches the canvas. She expressed her feminine side, her soul and always has some strong feelings when she starts a painting. Her paintings are very sensual and even sexual.

The sexuality in her paintings has a long-term presence in the Modern and Contemporary art.

Sexuality has been a recurrent subject in the history of art almost since the beginning of known representations.

Nearly every civilization has created sexually explicit imagery, often in the context of spirituality or rituals concerning fertility, to express cultural ideals of beauty and virtue. Artists such as Gauguin and Pablo Picasso sought to reclaim an unrestrained sexual energy, albeit with an adolescent disregard for the humanity of their lovers.

The discovery of repressed sexuality by Sigmund Freud has contributed to a contemporary culture obsessed with the sexual body. The ascent of a scientific worldview and industrialization has corresponded with rampant materialism. Each of us can examine the ways in which our relationship to sexuality, beauty, sensuality, in general, is a limiting fixation without any meaning.

We can find pieces of these emotions expressed in the paintings of Iliana.