Celebrity childhood. "Star" elves in the paintings of the Kharkov artist Nikolina Bakumenko

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

We all come from childhood. Even harsh military leaders and dictators, famous politicians and athletes, kings and queens, writers and popular actors once walked in diapers, were afraid of the dark, and were fascinated by toy stands in stores. With this in mind, the Kharkiv artist Nikolina Bakumenko drew a whole series of original paintings, where she depicted celebrities in childhood, turning them … into fairy elves. In foreign media, a series of films about celebrities in childhood is known under the short name Famous Elves, in the original it is called " When the elves are awake". Taking childhood photographs of famous people as a basis, Nikolina Bakumenko tried not only to transfer facial features to the canvas, but also to look into the very essence, to trace the character of the character in order to place him in an environment in which he would feel natural, at ease, look For example, the artist portrayed the President of France Nicolas Sarkozy as an elf, who sits on top of Notre Dame Cathedral, looking at the surroundings from a height. And in the hands of the charming elf, who is known to us as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, is a balloon crowned with a miniature of the Kremlin and painted in the colors of the national flag.

Why exactly elves? Nikolina is sure that each of us has something of these light winged creatures from the Looking Glass, from a parallel world. The artist has been fond of this topic for a long time, but she decided to represent famous people as elves relatively recently. The first "star" elf was Astrid Lindgren, one of the artist's favorite writers. Then other works appeared, which later turned into a whole exhibition. So, Nikolina Bakumenko finds photos of celebrities in childhood on the Internet or books, selects the appropriate images, and draws.

Nikolina Bakumenko calls her work parasymbolism, since the characters in her paintings are real people, but depicted as elves, and even in combination with symbolic images that indicate exactly who these fairy-tale heroes are in real life. In addition to these celebrities, the series "When Elves Aren't Sleeping" also features "elven" portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Klitschko brothers, Queen Elizabeth II and Boris Yeltsin, Franz Schubert and Gerald Durrell, Walter Scott and Imre Kalman. Of course, Nikolina Bakumenko does not intend to stop there. These and other works of the Ukrainian artist can be seen on her website.