Alonso: I tend to the position that 'thinking/feeling' dualism is a mistake in philosophical thinking. I mean, it's not a mistake because if taken as a presupposition, it leads to very interesting thoughts and that's never a mistake. I certainly have benefitted by supposing this in my thinking as well, but now I think I benefit more from a more holistic view of the span of sentient activity of the human. I think what often is called 'intellectual' is very emotional, to me, and that there is no clear priority (either to be pursued, or to be experienced) between thinking and feeling emotions. To ponder on something for me is an intellectual process as well. I realize it seems when it happens to one to be accessing 'different parts of the brain' as it were but it was startling to me when I approached it phenomenologically and realized that when I am pondering on a thing very directly, and when I am experiencing an emotional stimulus, what my body does is very similar. The classicist approach tends to say 'when emotional, one acts. When intellectual, one doesn't act, instead stands and thinks'. Well, I don't see how to 'stand and think' doesn't constitute an action, and how it is not emotionally charged to begin with.
When I am faced with an intellectual challenge, I respond to it with much the same emotions that a child would respond to an offer to go outside and play football with his friends.
On symbolism/metaphor, yes I see why the distinction would be made by Tarkovsky in that historically, symbolism has a 'this stands in for that' structured language. A human skull represents mortality, a woman in the darkness represents temptation, so on. Whereas a metaphor requests one be a bit more proactive in interpretation, but really, not too much. I don't think it's such a useful distinction for the working artist because really the working artist should go on working and not worry on whether his metaphors are really hard symbols or vice versa. It's not like either approach will arrive at a more comprehensible work of art (from my experience at least). Even if you write a legend in the beginning of your artwork 'this stands in for that', you know? People will still interpret it very wildly.
Thank you for the interesting thoughts, by the way.
Ryu and Cure, that is a valid approach to retaining the high contrast of the original sketch, but it's not something I thought of as a priority in capturing, I instead focused more on nuance and multi-level rendering. The why of the thing is pretty strange... I like the pencil art version but at the same time I am wary of portraying someone like F. Nietzsche in a 'cartoony' and simplified light. This is the main reason - I now realize - for most of the changes, how the arm is missing, how the eyes were played down a bit, how the rendering became a bit less dramatic. I don't want to portray the man as too much of a psychopath (or strung out, as mentioned) so I am more pleased with the pixel version than the pencil version in this respect.