kristina ryumina
SAINT SEBASTIAN BEFORE FIRST EXECUTION
Depicting St. Sebastian has been my dream for a while. Why him? Firstly, his athletic nude body pierced with arrows (as it is portrayed in most paintings) has been exciting the minds of pious lasses (including myself) for several hundred years already. If we look at the Baroque paintings, we won’t be able to describe the Saint in any way other than a luxurious piece of Christian meat (he's just so voluptuous!). Secondly, Sebastian was admirably pertinacious... pertinacious even in his death: when Roman emperor Diocletian found out that Sebastian was a Christian, he ordered to kill the handsome lad by shooting arrows at him, but Sebastian did not die (St. Irene nursed him to health), and as soon as he had recovered he went back to the Emperor telling him that it was bad to kill Christians, to which Diocletian's only reaction was ordering to club Sebastian to death (this time successfully).
I wanted to portray Sebastian as a man full of life, almost red (hence all these colors) and the forest – blue, cold and empty (as people were cold and deaf to the words of Sebastian).
The pose of the Saint resembles a spermatozoon, which is a reference to the religious idea of men being sinful from birth. However, there is hope: among the dried leaves under Sebastian's feet we see green sprouts, symbolizing the cleansing of the human mind from false teachings, the emergence of an understanding between people.
The left side of Sebastian looks like a wave of the vicissitudes of fate and is in contrast (as well as the whole soft snakelike body of the martyr) with firmness of the tree - the eternal laws of the universe and nature.
SAINT SEBASTIAN BEFORE FIRST EXECUTION
Depicting St. Sebastian has been my dream for a while. Why him? Firstly, his athletic nude body pierced with arrows (as it is portrayed in most paintings) has been exciting the minds of pious lasses (including myself) for several hundred years already. If we look at the Baroque paintings, we won’t be able to describe the Saint in any way other than a luxurious piece of Christian meat (he's just so voluptuous!). Secondly, Sebastian was admirably pertinacious... pertinacious even in his death: when Roman emperor Diocletian found out that Sebastian was a Christian, he ordered to kill the handsome lad by shooting arrows at him, but Sebastian did not die (St. Irene nursed him to health), and as soon as he had recovered he went back to the Emperor telling him that it was bad to kill Christians, to which Diocletian's only reaction was ordering to club Sebastian to death (this time successfully).
I wanted to portray Sebastian as a man full of life, almost red (hence all these colors) and the forest – blue, cold and empty (as people were cold and deaf to the words of Sebastian).
The pose of the Saint resembles a spermatozoon, which is a reference to the religious idea of men being sinful from birth. However, there is hope: among the dried leaves under Sebastian's feet we see green sprouts, symbolizing the cleansing of the human mind from false teachings, the emergence of an understanding between people.
The left side of Sebastian looks like a wave of the vicissitudes of fate and is in contrast (as well as the whole soft snakelike body of the martyr) with firmness of the tree - the eternal laws of the universe and nature.