“Music leads me to the threshold and silence allows me to step through it.” (An Interview With Sjafril)
Sjafril is the featured artist for Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah. A visual artist and writer, his work moves between digital illustration, poetry, and prose, often blurring the line between dream and critique, the sacred and the absurd. Raised in a space where silence was both shelter and question, he learned to listen for what language alone could not hold. His figures float, his words fracture. He draws textures of cloth, memory, and skin—places where vulnerability rests. Sjafril writes with a sense of longing, not for resolution but for recognition. Whether through image or text, he is drawn to the edges of identity and the human condition. His practice is rooted in the belief that stillness, strangeness, and sincerity can all live in the same breath. You can find him on Ko-fi or Instagram.
H/M: Opus II, Issue II of Half Mystic Journal highlights the theme of Sevdah, a genre of Turkish and Bosnian folk music evoking sorrowful love and ecstatic, amorous yearning—violin solos, velvet on bare skin, broken odes, the moment when the sky and water turn the same colour and meet at the edge of the world. Where does desire live in your work?
Sjafril: Desire in my work arrives not with fire but with breath. It slips in during the stillest hours, when human noise folds into itself and only the pulse of the unseen remains. What lingers then isn’t bodily craving, but soul-hunger—something more enduring and elemental.
I often turn to Sufi mysticism, especially Rumi’s Divan-e Shams, where longing is less of an ache than a door. I spend long nights listening to that quiet only the dark knows. It’s in such a liminal space that my work takes shape: from below brushstrokes and commas, in the tension between presence and absence. Desire, for me, is a form of devotion. A sanctuary of melancholy in the lack of having. A shelter against frenzy. A prayer with no need for sound.
These images hold an exquisite sense of motion. Bodies float and twist in midair. Birds take flight alongside arrows. How does music help you access a sense of movement in your art?
Before anything concrete takes shape, I get lost in deliberate disorientation. I surround myself with sound, as if walking into a tangled fog of melody and rhythm. An initial chaos is essential. It stirs things loose. Then comes menep, a Javanese word meaning “to be steadfast, settled, or resolute.” In that centring, the noise thins out. From there, movement reveals itself as both action and instinct. The arc of an arrow, the lift of a wing, the stretch of a spine midair all emerge from the emotional and artistic tension between silence and noise. Put more straightforwardly, I think music leads me into the wilderness of making, while quiet teaches me how to move through it.
Each piece in your Sevdah suite uses a similar palette of deep, rich tones—burgundy, teal, gold, navy, ruby. What resonances do these colours hold for you?
The colours in my work are less an aesthetic choice than a frequency I resonate with deeply and indefinably. According to Javanese teachings, my birth date aligns with stones like turquoise, sapphire, diamond, and topaz. I never sought out these shades consciously, but I’ve always felt their pull, as if they remember something I’ve forgotten. Ruby hums with hurt; teal speaks of solitude; gold catches hope mid-fall and holds it gently. Together, they create a kind of emotional topography. They remind me that beauty doesn’t need to shout to be heard, doesn’t need to explain to be understood.
Sevdah music takes its name from the Ottoman Turkish “sevda,” which refers to the intense, forlorn longing associated with unrequited love. Your work includes many images of the natural world: flower petals, lapping waves, shooting stars. What does nature long for?
As I mentioned earlier, I’m heavily influenced by Divan poetry, folk music, and classical gending. I see echoes of the same sevdah in those human-made arts that I do in nature. Like all of us, nature longs for communion, for the miracle of being seen.
I try to let petals or tides speak to me before I impose narrative upon them. A flower represents fragility, which in my work becomes a declaration. A bird in flight carries motion, but I see it also as prayer, hope, the ghost of what’s passed away. The constant night sky feels watchful to me—it’s a boundless witness, a guardian too gentle to interfere yet too present to ignore. Nature doesn’t scream. It waits and offers room to interpret. Its longing isn’t linear but cyclical, leading back always to a search for understanding. In that rhythm of seeing and drawing connections, I find a very human-feeling kinship.
The moon is present in nearly all of your illustrations: sometimes standing in for the head of a beloved or a bird, as in The Kiss and Shirin, and sometimes cradled in the arms of your figures, as in The Moonbearer and Que Sera. What is your relationship to the moon? What does it symbolise in these works?
I consider myself an astrophile, someone addicted to night. The moon has always been my confidante—I was born under its gaze and have spent most of my life walking its hours. Its radiance is borrowed from elsewhere and so never demands attention. To me, it represents what’s sacred but unattainable, distant but faithful. It watches without judging. It listens without answering. In my work, the moon takes on many different guises, whether a face, a wound, or a gift. Those aren’t intended to hide, though, just to illuminate what surrounds it. The moon is too far to touch yet close enough to worship. It’s an emblem of everything tender and intangible. The part of us we show only when the world is asleep.
Is there a playlist you listen to while illustrating? What songs place you in the artistic process?
Song sets the mood, like incense for the soul. I surround myself with it during the ideation stage. It helps me enter the atmosphere of the piece, like stepping into different weather. A few anchors: “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas reminds me that everything slips through our hands eventually. “Owl and Wolf” by the SIGIT has a primal, almost mythic undercurrent I’m very drawn to. And Kiai Kanjeng’s whole discography, but especially “Rampak Osing,” feels like a ritual more than a song. Its rhythm roots me.
But once I begin illustrating, I prefer silence. I find the real dialogue begins at this point, where I hear what can’t be heard. Music leads me to the threshold and silence allows me to step through it.
You’ve described your practise in the past as a “soft rebellion.” How do you cultivate softness in your art and your personal life?
I don’t believe softness is weakness, but rather a refusal to harden. It’s an act of resistance against cynicism and despair, even when the world insists upon them. In my creative process, it manifests as spaciousness: allowing ambiguity, making room for contradiction, refusing to simplify what’s meant to be complex. In life, it’s more challenging. I stumble often, but I try to return to a quiet centre, the place in me that remains open. The world is loud with certainty, and I don’t make art that competes with it. Instead, I hope the work whispers, “come back to yourself.” I try to build a place for people to rest, even for a just a moment, that feels wild and forgiving.
You are a writer as well as a visual artist. How do your poetry and prose inform your art, and vice versa? Is your written work inspired by music in the same way as your visual art?
Writing and painting are twin branches of the same tree. They share roots, even when their fruits look different. Sometimes a line of poetry morphs into the seed of an image. Other times, a painting demands a story to carry it. They contradict, converse with, and complete each other. If I can’t express something in paint, I turn to words. Where language fails, I reach for form, colour, and space. Music weaves through both, especially during the early stages of creation. But while my visual work is moved by rhythm and atmosphere, my writing emerges where song ends, leaving only its echo.
I was particularly arrested by your decision to give the figure in Que Sera a face, while the other figures in this series are faceless or obscured. She gazes serenely at an approaching butterfly and clings to a golden moon despite the arrow piercing her hand. In your mind, will she ever let go?
I’m still learning from her.
That figure materialised almost fully-formed, as if she’d always been waiting in the wings. She was born from Doris Day’s classic song “Que Sera, Sera,” which of course translates to “whatever will be, will be.” Like many spiritual truths, it carries the wisdom of acceptance and the weight of surrender to something greater. Look at the little girl’s face—that serenity isn’t emptiness, it’s resolve. Her pain isn’t hidden, but neither is her grace. She clutches the moon as a lantern. The arrow through her hand is undeniable, but it doesn’t break her hold.
Will release her grip? I can’t say. Maybe the butterfly, in its delicate and inevitable flight, has already let go for her.
This interview, alongside fourteen pieces of art by Sjafril, is featured in Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. In the mythic yawn between absence and presence, Opus II, Issue II wanders an empty airport terminal like centre stage. Tenderness blossoms fragile and fragrant here, coiled around the thorn of desire. The sevdah issue breathes at once as song and spell: a vow made in a past world, a memory yet to be lived, chords drinking down silence and lingering long after the ghosts have gone. Preorder your copy today.