Chicken Foot House

I'm ashamed to say that I have not painted or drawn anything for about a week now, maybe even two! It's partially because I got really burnt out on panting all those ornaments, it took a lot out of me because I had to come up with so many different ideas AND execute them all in such a short span of time. Another reason is the performance with my band, Gipsy Pirate Octopi. I took a few days to prepare myself mentally and musically for it, but also it really got me off on a track of practicing music everyday. I've actually been learning a lot on the piano and finally figured out how to make any chord I want now, using the piano keys. Something that I didn't really have to know for the accordion, because if I want to press a chord I just have to press the button that's that chord and I don't ever need to know which notes make it so.

Anyways...Today I came across an old post on this blog that spoke of an illustration I did back when I was in Russia, this summer, for one of my favorite fairytales ever, "The Terrible Revenge", by Gogol. The post reminded me of the fact that there's that other project I started working on quite a while ago and that there's no reason not to get back to it even though I'm still in the midst of the matryoshkas. Working on the ornaments in the saturated way that I did made me see how being stuck in one mode really stifles me, and I think it's a good idea to distract myself and my imagination for a short while by investing myself in a different project and then simply coming back to the matryoshkas refreshed and hopefully inspired with some new perspective.

For now, I'm posting another of the ornaments. This one is of the famous house on chicken feet that the equally famous baba-yaga lives in. There is more than one Baba Yaga and more than one house on chicken feet in the Russian fairy world. On Wikipedia I read that the reason the chicken foot house came about is that back in the day houses in Russia were often stood up on stilts or stumps because of the watery and boggy nature of the land, so that the house won't rot. I also have a memory of either being told or reading somewhere (although I don't remember where or by who) that the house is representative of coffins where people were buried in ancient Russia, also on stilts, because in pagan times it was considered bad to bury the dead in watery graves. So since the terrain was so watery, they buried the dead on stilts.

In the fairy tales Baba Yaga is often described as sitting in her house with her nose grown into the ceiling. This is a connotation of being in a tight space where you're on your back and your nose touching the ceiling is like a coffin...She and her house are representative of the other world, the dead world. It is also often said that the house is without windows or doors. Also coffin-like...

In this image in particular her house is also surrounded by the bones and sculls of people she'd eaten. A scene from one of my favorite childhood fairytales, Vasilisa the Beautiful.