The painting depicting a dead city covered by a huge sheet carried by birds was created in 2021, and the work on it took two months and was finished at the turn of March and April. I do not remember when the idea on this topic arose: whether it appeared as a variation of the city with a pet, or maybe it arose at a different time. And I remember the frame that appeared before my eyes, which was similar to the one presented, and the starry sky as the third plan of the whole. On the constructional level, I wanted a kind of pathos of the scene, in which flying headsless birds hold a damaged canvas, which is ultimately intended to cover the city, completing its end. Originally the birds were supposed to scream to add more drama to the scene, but after painting the sketch, I found silence to be more fitting and without losing the drama. That is why I removed the heads of the birds, which probably made everything even more dead. The initial idea was a huge fabric lying on the ground, which birds pulled over the ruins like a huge sheet, but in the course of work I thought to connect the second plane (fabric) with the third (sky), so that the sheet would flow down from the sky. I found it a more interesting solution and painted it. I wanted a highly saturated light reflected from the sky, which was balanced by a soft reddish light above the horizon on the opposite side. All this to reinforce the unreality of the situation. Sometimes I have dreams in this kind of lighting. As a complement to the whole, on one of the buildings I painted a figure making a silencing gesture. I do not want to describe the philosophical, or perhaps more ideological, part in order not to spoil the viewer’s inquiries and, contrary to appearances, it is not too great. When the painting entered the detail stage, the silence I thought at the sketch stage turned into the beginning of Carmina Burana’s “O Fortuna” with the characteristic sound of a choir, so sometimes I looked at it as a spectacle of silence, and at other times in the background I heard the beginning of the aforementioned work by Carl Orff. The picture is 100 x 118 cm and it is painted in oil technique on an aluminum plate.
