Thursday Salute to Originals: Egg-stravagent Murals
For those celebrating Easter, in a few days, Peter Cotton Tail will be hopping down the bunny trail bringing chocolate, candy, and of course, Easter Eggs. A symbol now synonymous with the holiday, Easter Eggs have been decorated for centuries and are embellished through a variety of methods – everything from the simple drugstore egg dye you used as a kid, all the way to intricately carved shells requiring specialized tools and highly skilled craft. But one artist’s specialty is not just in decorating Easter Eggs, but in utilizing them as building blocks in her massive installations.
Oksana Mas is a Ukrainian artist who uses the egg decorating method for which her country is famous – Ukrainian Eggs – as her medium. Each intricately hand painted egg (she uses wooden ones) is beautiful in its own right; but Mas’ artistic vision doesn’t just stop there. Instead, she takes the complexly decorated orbs and painstakingly arranges them into large-scale mosaics.
Taking thousands – and sometimes MILLIONS – of hand painted eggs to produce a mural series, her works are art are certainly a time-consuming endeavor. But her works are not simply limited to recreating religious scenes. She’s also utilized decorated Ukranian Eggs in creating more abstract spherical sculptures.
Though her installations are several years old now, that does not diminish their beauty or the overwhelming sense of scale, repetition, form, color, and texture exuded from these photos. For that, we salute Oksana Mas for taking a beloved and cherished Easter Egg decorating tradition and translating it into innovative and modern mass artworks. We think the Easter Bunny would agree, her work and artistic prose is truly Egg-ceptional!
Image Credits: AJ Weissbard; Flickr; Alchetron; Panoramio; Barbarian Art Gallery; Artaic