“When you work on something for a long time, magic happens, beauty happens.” ~ Maria Kreyn INTERVIEW WITH MARIA KREYN, FIGURATIVE PAINTER New York City: Deanna Elaine Piowaty: Do...
"It's when characters in a picture are overflowing with Dignity, when I feel empathy for them, and I can sense they feel that for each other. All of my favorite work seems to have an abundance of dignity, empathy, and fantasy. For me, Courage and Goodness are synonymous." It seems to me that if we meet our truth with goodness/bravery - the result is beauty...Comfort - protection - consolation - we definitely long for these. Irony - at least as a philosophical groundwork - seems a shortcut - with no real satisfaction
The red twilight, the turning point, is manifested in the female figure, plunged to the ground by three men – who represent the night. The child symbolizes the vulnerable remaining rays of the sunlight. The moon, which represents the illumination in Heraclit’s model, lights the way through the darkness and reappears as the lantern brandished by one of the soldiers.
The artist exiled from his home created a theatre of characters in his imagined world, armed, beaten, and alienated, caught in conflict, ritual, love and rest; the afflicted and exhausted; these abandoned self portraits of a bloodied Nerdrum, cast as criminal, then as a weary man whose companions are outcasts, mutilated and war-torn, abandoned to the stern, severely beautiful landscape. We find the dead and the dying here, the victims of the aftermath, a record of the conflict between survivors and their struggle against despair.