Tatiana Vasilyeva continued her father’s work: wax painting became one of her favorite techniques. The artist dedicated the work “Lel” to the hero of Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky’s fairytale play “The Snow Maiden”, and the playwright, in turn, borrowed this image from the book “The Slav’s Poetical Views of Nature”.
In Russian and Polish mythology of the 16th–19th centuries, Lel was the deity of love, sometimes marriage. In the play by Alexander Ostrovsky, parents called their son, a shepherd boy, by this divine name. For the ability to play the pipe beautifully and cheerfully, the heavenly Lel gifted his namesake a magic reed pipe, to the sounds of which even wild animals, flowers and trees started to dance.
When creating this painting, Tatiana Khvostenko supplemented the encaustic technique with light gilding to give the image a special vividness and emphasize the subtlety of drawing. To apply gilding, the paint layer is first polished and coated with ganosis — a special compound that gives shine and strength to the work. The areas intended for gilding are covered with mordant — a varnish based on oils and resins. It is usually used in this technique. After two or three hours, the mordant layer begins to become sticky. Then gilding is applied: thin pieces of gold leaf are laid out on the desired fragments of the picture with the help of a special “paw” made of a bear’s ear. They can be easily removed from the surface which was simply polished, but they leave a trace on the areas covered with varnish. Gilding must be applied carefully, in one layer, so that the grayish gesso can be seen through it. Otherwise, an excess of gloss will make the whole work feel heavier.
This painting was donated to the Borisovka Museum of Local Lore by the artist herself, Tatiana Vasilyevna Khvostenko.
