SCHLOSS ROSEGG, KÄRNTEN
SCHLOSS ROSEGG, KÄRNTEN
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The project at Schloss Rosegg was carried out under the generous patronage of Prince Stefan von und zu Liechtenstein, and is a celebration of the fantastic building with its 5 meter high white walls that just seemed to cry out to be painted with something epic!
The Schloss is built after the manner of an Italian Baroque palazzo from the Veneto region, many of which are elaborately decorated with beautiful frescos. Italian frescos often contain figures of different sizes, lavish natural embellishments, epic landscapes and religious or classical themes, so the potential to get excited was absolutely unlimited!
It seemed from the beginning that we needed to include giant figures in order to get the maximum effect from the high ceilings.
Giants battling it out have always been amoung my favourite motifs - one that I will surely refturn to in future works. The amazing Sala dei Giganti at the Palazzo Te in Mantua is the best example of this, but numerous frecos include Colossi or 'Caryatids' that hold up the ceiling.
Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque artists tend to divide walls into sections, with pannels along the lower part of the wall which indicate a sort of domestic level, and landscapes opening in the spaces above. One of my favorite examples of this is by the wonderful artist Vasari at the Palazzo Veccio in Florence. The Sala degli Elementi is a masterpiece of visual composition and a fine example of diagramatic thiniing that presents a macrocosmos within a limited space that one can walk into and be surrounded by.
The project took on renewed impetus when we decided to celebrate a biblical narrative, which I felt should be a kind of timeline that showed the moment of creation, the old and new testaments, and the second coming of Christ. The space can be roughly divided into four sections, so the organisation of the work seemed to fit. The sketch below was a first attempt to realise the concept, which came to be titled 'The Room of the Divine Chronology'.
The above collage was developed as part of the project proposal and uses images from a wide variety of historical artists to give a sense of how the final image would look and feel. For the artwork istelf I developed original compositions for each of the panels and strove to create original figures with their own poses and costumes. The final design was painted on paper at around 1.5 meters long and took about 20 days of work to complete.
improvements.movThe painted image was then scanned at 600dpi and worked on in sections digitally, adding additional detail so that the work could be printed on a massive scale. The finalised artwork was then divided into 15 strips and printed on a breathable mesh so that the walls of the castle can continue to breathe.
left: the process of adding more detail
contemporary details are added to the image so that the viewer can locate the
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