Do It For Your Soul

Each new thing is a little victory of a man over nature. Already primitive men learnt to turn stone, wood and bones into weapons helping to fight enemies, hunt, cook food. And then people started creating things just for soul. We are going to tell about two masters who create things not similar to each other but united by aesthetic beauty.

Many peoples believe an egg to be a symbol of life but sometimes eggs become art objects.

Vitaly Fedotov is the only one engraver who works with egg shells. He creates unique and refined things from this material.

He’s been engraving since 1984 but with egg shells he started to work only in 2011. He just wanted to try something new.

Precious metals were expensive for Vitaly but hands asked to create something unique.

This craft is utterly laborious and demands utmost accuracy. The process should be done in full silence, any false step may turn a finished product into a heap of powder in a second.

It’s hard to carve egg shell with a knife. It is similar to marble. But it is easily polished gaining glitter.

To make an egg empty Vitaly used to suck it with his mouth. It even came to nausea, quite unpleasant. Then he found a way out and started using a syringe.

When an egg is empty it has to be defatted from inside with special solution, and the shell has to be strengthened with glue. After that the egg has to lie for two days at least.

The most expensive artwork of Vitaly costs about 30 000 tenge ($200): Jesus Christ is depicted on an ostrich egg, its image was being created for 2 months. Another ostrich egg represents the symbol of Kazakhstan – an eagle in sun rays is carved on it.

Vitaly works with hen, duck, goose and ostrich eggs.

The hardest egg is an ostrich one, it has three layers. On each layer some composition may be created and the result is a complicated multilayer depiction. A chicken’s egg has the most fragile structure, but real masterpieces may be created on it.

Emu’s egg

If a master is nervous he shouldn’t start engraving. Sometimes it happens that some millimetres remain to be processed and in this very moment the shell cracks and the labour of some weeks runs to waste. The hardest thing about the work – you can’t be sure that you cut out lines properly, cause you cannot see white on white, and only when you paint it you see what you’ve done.

Let us see how an image is depicted on a chicken’s egg.

Vitaly invented tools for work himself

Engraving with a drilling machine

The material is very fragile

Varnishing

Supports for eggs are difficult to find and they cost unreasonably much.

Here’s what he’s got, and it’s not absolutely finished. The process took 1,5 hours.

And this is Firuza who creates wonderful crystal trees. She started to create when gave birth to her second child. In the daytime she runs her business, in the evening she’s mom and wife and at nights and in weekends she creates what her soul needs – decorative trees from crystals. Trees of happiness!

She does not use machines, all trees are made manually. Almost all necessary materials are ordered in the Internet.

Firuza gave her first tree to her sister. It was rather different from what she makes now.

Colors should match well with each other.

She’s made about 30 trees, 10 of them are for an exhibition.

No photograph can reproduce all the beauty of crystals. The works must be seen at exhibitions. Some stores offered Firuza to sell her works but thus the trees cost will increase twice so she refused.

First of all the master strings each crystal on thin wire. Depending on a tree size it may have 300-700 crystals.

It’s the longest part of the work takin 1-2 weeks.

Then crystals are grouped and twisted…

.. to be turned to branches. It’s also very laborious.

Imagine you should hold a 3 kg branch in one hand and with another one you should carefully wrap it around with metallic. Hands are going to ache after that as hell…

It takes 2-4 weeks to make one tree.

One of the exhibitions

Firuza’s trees. They cost $54 and more.

“I don’t like when people say that I have plenty of time to spend for nothing. Believe me, if your soul requires something, you’ll always find time for this something you like!”

via voxpopuli