Title:
St Sophia, Greater Novgorod, Russia
Medium:
watercolour
Size: 40 x
30 cm (approx)
Our family
lived in Moscow, Russia for 3 years 2005-8, and one of the delights for
me as an artist was the ancient church architecture. Much has
been destroyed in the Communist years, but what remains is still wonderful
and many have been recently restored. We visited Greater Novgorod,
an ancient capital of Russia in the North West of the country, on a lovely
day of sunshine and showers and the light on the domes of the cathedral
looking across from the belltower was beautiful. Every historic city
has a ‘Kremlin’, a walled, fortified centre. And there is always a church,
cathedral or several of them inside the walls. They are a reminder
of the heavenly city. The gold of the dome is hundreds of years old
yet still untarnished. One of the challenges I set myself was to
learn how to paint reflections in gold domes – it takes a lot of careful
observation of what is really there. Whilst painting another church in
Moscow I was struck by how the gold domes reflect the busy life and pain
of the city streets below but transforming and lifting them up into the
reflection of the heavens above.
Smolenskaya
Church, Moscow (detail)
Every aspect
of the architecture in a Russian Orthodox church is symbolic, the domes
pointing to heaven, the number and arrangement of dome, the shape of the
groundplan etc. I spent a lot of time photographing Russian churches
and still would like to spend more time painting them.
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