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Video: Winter and sun: the history of the great circle. Winter photo collection
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Winter - this is the time of gray clouds and impenetrable twilight, the time of constant night. but frost and sun - an image that always evokes a response, and is very often used in various kinds of art - it's not for nothing that Pushkin's lines about a wonderful day and a charming dormant friend are remembered by everyone from childhood. Artists and photographers keep up with poets. In that review of art on the theme of winter and sun we will try to understand what is so surprising and fascinating in the image of the winter sun - and, as usual, we will admire the selected works.
Winter story
It's hard to imagine that winter has a story - and yet it does. Because over the past millennia, both she and the people who resisted her cold have changed more than once. Even during the last ice age, our ancestors, dressed in hard work and luck obtained skins, tried to somehow survive in the winter - and then it was really harsh.
But, although the glaciation receded over time, the nature of winter has not changed. This is the time when nature falls asleep - and primitive man, still little experienced in understanding the world, arose a reasonable question: where are the guarantees that she will wake up? Sometimes sleep is so hard to distinguish from death …
That is why the feeling that winter aroused in our distant ancestors is best described as a dark, chilling horror. Nature is dying; trees lose their foliage and stand in ugly thorns; the beast is hiding, the bird has flown away; even the sun turned bad and stopped warming!
Isn't that the end of the world, Twilight of the Gods? But the ancients, although they were naive, excelled in the strength of the spirit of all creatures and nature itself. Even in the face of imminent death in the icy embrace of winter, they could not believe that nothing could be done. They knew: if a person tries very hard, then spring will come again! After all, everything in the world depends on the person.
Magic and celebration
The ancients considered magic to be the force with which a person can influence the universe. Rites, songs and ritual dances, shamans' rituals and sacrifices, prayers to good gods and cunning tricks against evil - all went into action in the mystical twilight of humanity's childhood in order to conquer winter.
New Year, Yule and Kolyada are not holidays, but battles. On this day, people desperately spent the supplies accumulated over the year (we no longer understand how scary it is to arrange a feast in conditions when food may never appear at all), gathered all their courage and, in magical ecstasy, went out to spiritual battle with winter. And they always won.
Echoes of those ancient victories - today's morning doorbells and a timid child's voice "Can you poke around?", Nationwide jubilation on the occasion of the New Year and Christmas, and much more. The circle closes: primitive people won the sun for us, and then all spring and summer, squinting with joy, enjoyed the trophy.
Frost and sun
And now we get to the point. The shining of the sun in the winter sky was for our ancestors something like the last ray of dying hope - until the Winter solstice on December 22. And - a symbol of the victory of life over death, a subject of personal pride - after the winter holidays. The ancients could not help but notice that immediately after their magical actions, the sun quickly rose again.
And this feeling has not faded away. The inspiration that modern artists and photographers experience at the sight of the sun illuminating snowdrifts and a snow-covered forest is a shaman's howl transformed over the centuries, a cry of fierce joy or fierce longing of a primitive man.
So winter and the sun became a constant subject of landscape painting, and many works on this topic entered the golden fund of fine arts. And these pictures will take us by the soul forever - as long as there is winter and as long as there is sun.
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