07/11/2024
Phoenix.
We've heard a lot about phoenixes - it was exactly this bird that brought Harry Potter the Gryffindor sword in a difficult moment, we know that phoenixes are born from ashes, and so on, but mostly this information comes from movies or fiction. However, the first record of this mythical creature can be found in the history of Ancient Egypt. According to mythology, during the creation of the universe by the god Atum, the bird Bennu flew to the prehistoric hill of Benben. This means that Atum has created the entire universe, but not this bird. The bird itself symbolized the heart of the god Ra, sunlight, and the eternal rebirth of everything in the universe. The Egyptians depicted it in the form of a heron, a yellow egret, or a fiery yellow eagle. Over time, the great Egyptian civilization fell into decline, but the mythical bird has moved into the cosmogony and philosophy of the nations of Europe and the Middle East and is still there up to this day. In modern esotericism, the phoenix lucky charms are a symbol of radical changes in life, as well as getting rid of all things that are not necessary.
While creating my Phoenix, I was not interested in the esoteric side of this symbol, I was more attracted by the philosophical and purely artistic aspects of this work.
The thing is that the old generation of artists used to say that painting a sculpture was not a proper thing to do. They said that in ancient Greece and then Rome it was customary to paint statues, and moreover, to do it in an extremely realistic way. And it didn't do anything good for the modern taste. This kind of sculpture will always be "a little bit worse than in real life," so it's not worth doing. However, the idea of a modern colored sculpture has been on my mind for decades. And indeed, making fire on a flat surface is no longer a problem now even for amateurs. But how to recreate it in a 3D space?
So, ladies and gentlemen, painting on a bas-relief (or a painting bas-relief?))) "The Phoenix! Of course, even a very high-quality photo does not fully represent it. Just like with any painting, you need to hang it on a real wall and take two steps back.
Thank you for visiting the page, yours Ante Oriol.
