Crested tit
I have always loved good wine. Without exception, the deepest and most sensual conversations, the most delicious dinners and the cosiest movie nights take place around an elegant-looking glass. When I look at red wine, I marvel at how deep and vibrant the colour is. A colour that you cannot see anywhere else. Perhaps it is an artist’s innate gift to notice the beauty in even the simplest things in life.
Some time ago, I created a relief of the crested tit, which is often found in Lithuania. It is a bird, glued together from the corks of old wine bottles and set against a blue background. Looking at the piece, I kept thinking that something was still missing to make it complete. The right answer came from the same charming red wine, the colour of which kept catching my eye and my imagination, and eventually became one of the main working tools of the “Crested Tit”.
Wine as a creative medium seemed new and unexplored to me. I had to do a lot of experiments and tests to see how the fabric reacts to colour, how the brightness is transmitted and how it lasts. Anyone who has spilled red wine on a light-coloured surface at least once knows the usual brightness of the remaining stains. But when I started dyeing fabrics, I found that each type of it absorbed the wine differently…
Some fabrics took on a pastel and barely visible shade, while others took on a vibrant and rich colour. I kept the material in the liquid for a few hours, dried them, ironed, cut the threads and shredded them into the right shapes. Once all the details were made, I started the gluing process. I had to use extreme care and precision to cover the background around the small details with the perfect collage technique.
This time the creative process was different, because I finished the work not in my art studio as usual, but at a public event. The evening guests gathered at the hotel watched me gluing the last parts of the material together, until the “Crested tit” became a real work of art. It was a very interesting and unusual feeling to show the audience not a perfect result, but a work in progress.
Dimensions: 85 x 150 cm.
