Our Lady and Comb Honey, 2018
Watercolour/ Oil/ Linen
The artist´s comment on the artwork:
“My work “Our Lady and Comb Honey” is dedicated to the themes of beauty and freedom. The painting is actually a portrait of Our Lady’s small autodidactic sculpture of the 19th century, which is only 25 centimetres high in the original. I fell in love with autodidactic wooden sculptures some years ago and, it seems to me, that both wood as material and simple images of this kind of rural art perfectly characterize the Baltic states. The small Our Lady’s face, covered with traces left by time, scratches and peeled off paint nevertheless embodies the idea of a reserved hidden power and beauty; a naivety of implementation imparts this image with purity and sincerity.
The assemblage consists of a rusted metal box produced in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, in which comb honey was used to be sold, and which I bought at a flea market in Riga (I think that such a product was most likely also sold at that time in Estonia ) and two birds – a gold one and the second, made of a wooden mache, who is about to get out of its box, which gives a hint of the idea of freedom. A bar of an 80-year-old fir, the oldest I could find, is at the base of the composition. The assemblage sends us back to the time when Estonia was already on the eve of proclaiming its independence.
A deep inner strength, restrained, modest beauty and a desire for freedom characterize Estonia, as well as the other two Baltic countries – Latvia and Lithuania.”
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