OCEAN ROAR
OIL ON CANVAS
46 x 100 INCHES
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We know that sounds evoke images and vice versa – there is a certain music behind the magic of an image. They say that inspiration for the Tales from the Vienna Woods by Johann Strauss came while the great composer was riding in a horse-drawn carriage through the spring forest: the singing of the birds, the gentle murmur of the stream, the leaves rustling in the passing wind – the sounds of nature chiming in as he moves along.
Music appears in the artist’s painting Born from the Sea: in the steady stirring of the waves we hear the peaceful Ocean singing a gentle lullaby to its offspring.
The Ocean is a living creature, it can be tender but it can be angry as well. The ‘furious ocean’ presented in this work – the roar of the woken up Lions – alludes to the fury of human soul.
Herman Melville in his famous novel Moby Dick poetically describes the ocean as a reflection of the living soul:
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath…”
The ocean’s gentle whisper is like a baby’s lisp or purring of a cat and at the same time like the roar of a hundred disturbed lions – it can be all of that!
The artist however introduces a new theme into the well-known cultural code of art – the subject of mercy and redemption. In an earlier painting I Saved My Soul the lion saves his soul by releasing the victim. This notion is conveyed through the stone figure of a lion with his head raised upwards and his gaze following a gentle and soft cloud floating high in the sky—the Lamb of God, the Savior of human soul.
