Longhorn Painting

In the process of working on a painting (which took exactly a year), the name changed several times in an attempt to accurately reflect the basic concept, which turned out to be easier to express with plastic painting methods than with literary formulations. As a result, the artist simply hid all five names, leaving only the simplest one that already lies on the surface: this is the name of the breed of a bull bred in North America: Longhorn. But if you break the veil of mystery and voice all these titles in turn - the view of the amazed public will appear five different works, united only by the fact that they depict the Bull. Here is the ode of: Masculinity (in our century of total tolerance, it is a very bold decision to present an explicit male to the viewer), Energy of Youth (a reminder of the powerful force of nature, boiling inside us too), America (all associations of the author, reflection, dreams and representations, cast in the form of a sign. A symbol of time, the state as the quintessence of the gaze of a free and large animal), Self Portrait (here we see a totemic animal that entered a dried-up field of reality directly from the artist’s subconscious, bringing with it a thunderstorm and humid air. A bold attempt at self-identification is not without irony and challenge), Riddle (the artist leaves the viewer with the opportunity to find the real name himself. This is an amazing opportunity to play an entertaining game, the rules in which you can invent right while looking at a silent bull. How many spectators, so many paintings will turn out in the end, and quite likely there will be such a spectator who will see that the picture depicts just a Bull and nothing more...) A very thin canvas with almost no visible texture, stretched over a light stretcher, is primed with tinted gray acrylic undercoat, which gives excellent adhesion and is very plastic with the subsequent possible folding of the picture into a roll. In the process, I used the classic technology of oil painting, used for centuries: an accurate drawing, a minimum of searches on the canvas, the minimum possible thickness of the paint layer, good drying of the layers before glaze. Flaxseed oil, inter-layer varnish, thinner, dammar varnish, brushes - from the flick-brush to the first number paintbrush. Since I had an exact understanding of what the final result would look like, I started with a precised drawing, which practically didn’t change during the painting process (for exactly a year with breaks). I painted the bull very opaque, pastose, with pure red light cadmium and allowed it to dry for several months. This was done so that when the work is finished - scrape the surface. At the same time, I got a unique flicker and purity effect of thin bright red lines, completely impossible if you try to apply thin red lines at the end from above on the finished surface. Grass, sky and bull are painted using specially different methods to achieve the maximum realistic effect. In the process of working, 5-6 glazes were applied, both cold and warm.