Neural Symphony
Series: Art Awakening
No: 11
Artwork: Neural Symphony
Original Artwork: 2023
Size: 50 × 70 cm
Medium: Acrylic painting
Technique: Hidden Layer Technique
© 2026 Sem T. Nova. All rights reserved.
Status: Not for Sale. Available for exhibitions.
This painting originally began as an attempt to create a landscape with a painted frame around it. But I got bored with the idea pretty quickly, so I put the unfinished canvas aside.
At some point, I came across it again and decided to simply continue with a bold red. Some of that red paint and a few of the palette knife marks are still there today, shimmering through the later layers. Depending on the light and viewing angle, some of those textured strokes almost seem to rise from the surface.
But somehow, I still wasn’t excited about it.
So I slept on it, looked at the painting again the next day and thought: No. This still isn’t it.
Sometimes it takes me a while to make a decision. But once I do, things can move pretty quickly and quite radically.
So I painted the entire canvas black.
And suddenly, it became interesting to me.
The fragments underneath had not disappeared. Instead, they began to show through in a completely different way.
It reminded me of Heart of Phoenix. In that earlier work, I had hidden a word within one of the first layers of the painting. That word is inside Heart of Phoenix. Depending on the light and viewing angle, you can sometimes still catch a glimpse of it.
So far, I am the only one who knows what the word is. I did capture it in a photograph at some point.
We will see what time brings and whether someone eventually discovers it.
But back to this painting.
Completely black was a little too much for me after all, so I added white. I simply have a thing for strong contrasts.
With free, expressive movements, lines, splashes and connections began to emerge.
At the time, I was fascinated by frequencies, neurons and neural connections. So when I looked at the painting, I quickly began to see synapses, impulses and a network of thoughts and connections.
Other people, however, see something completely different.
Some still jokingly call it my “sperm painting.”
I actually find that pretty amusing, because to me it perfectly shows how differently we can perceive the very same thing. I had something completely different in mind while creating it, yet someone else can look at it and immediately see something entirely different.
And that is exactly what I love about abstract art.
A painting can begin with one thought and still create a hundred others.
Had I left the background white and painted the lines black, the whole thing would literally have been the other way around.
Then again, considering what some people already see in it, we probably would have ended up being childish about it anyway. 😄