Wow. I feel torn, because this painting is so beautifully executed, your sense of line so breathtakingly clean, your use of color so delicate and gorgeous, all warm earth tones and blood, all decadence and lyricism, like a cave or a tanned hide. And the composition is marvelous, fascinating in all its grotesque detail. Harry glows at the center like a hybrid siren, something between Klimt or Schiele and the latest graphic novel.
I'm torn, though, because I don't see Snape and Harry in this painting. Since I don't know The Cell, I can't cross-pollinate between them and find the connecting thread. The symbolism is more a visual and intellectual pleasure than an emotional one, which isn't wrong, just . . different for me. I can bask in the stunning specifics - Snape's fingernails, the potions bottles balanced on the skeleton's vertebrae, the bloody doe - but they're strangers to me, these two. Which is kind of intriguing, because it means I keep staring at the shimmer of color and purity of line, trying to find them. It's disconcerting, and I like that. It pushes me deeper into the picture, and since it's basically a portrait of insanity, that means the more I stare, the more disturbing it becomes. It shows Snape, who in canon is this weird mix of powerful and utterly powerless, as indomitable, in a thoroughly deranged way. And it turns the whole Harry/Lily confusion into a psychosexual drama of submission and temptation. Not Harry as Lily but Harry as Lilith, transvestite seductress.
Impressive, erotic, and deeply sinister, a striking combination of the cruel and the beautiful. I'm not sure it matters if I can't quite see the characters, because the painting creates a universe of its own.