an inventory and documentary of art environments in Europe created by non-professionals
December 09, 2023
Nikolai Krylov, Дом с трехголовой змеей на крыше / House with a three-headed snake on the roof
unless indicated otherwise pictures are screenshots from the video in the documentation
The house pictured above, with a three-headed snake on the roof, is located in the village of Durasovo, in Russia's Yaroslavl region, about 250 km north of Moscow.
Life and works
This snake is a creation of Nikolai Anatolyevich Krylov, who - as far as could be determined - was born in the late 1950s.
As a young man Krylov dreamed of becoming an artist, but for practical reasons he became a carpenter. But then, a carpenter with a lot of imagination.....
He married and in1980 he bought the house in Durasovo. During the first years that he and his wife lived in this house, he paid a lot of attention to furnish it with all kinds of self-made or self-decorated furniture, such as tables, chairs and sofas.
But he also took a more creative path by, for example, providing the headboards of the beds with decorative wood carvings, and presumably also the rooms of the daughter and the three sons the couple had over the years.
He also made a side table with a top surface designed in such a way that it could be used to play a game of chess.
The outdoor area also got Krylov's attention.
This space was surrounded by a beautiful fence and a special hand-made fountain, as in above image, gave the garden in front of the house a special allure.
Not only was the facade painted in a vibrant sunny shade of yellow, also carved wooden decorations were applied around the windows and on the rest of the facade.
But the decorations on the roof were the items that attracted the most attention from passers-by.
To start, the image above shows a weather vane decorated with a rooster carved from sheet iron.
And then there is a hand-made rotating viewing dome, pictured below, with an interior decorated with fairy-tale characters. This dome is located at a height of about 15 meters, from where one has a panoramic view of the surroundings of the house.
But what most attracts the attention of passers-by is the three-headed snake that, as can be seen in the very first images, views the world from a trypan in the facade.
This creation was completed in 2011, after Krylov had worked on it for two years. He made the snake from driftwood he found in a nearby forest and he selected the parts in such a way that he had to sharpen them as little as possible. Krylov's snake is covered with pieces of sheet metal and has eyes in each head consisting of photocells, which shine in the darkness and occasionally flash red.
In Russia this snake is a well-known (fairytale) character called Zmey Gorynych, which means Snake of the Mountains. It usually has three heads, sometimes seven or nine, and can talk and breathe smoke and fire.
On the image below there is a second snake, also a large one, which has been installed on the part of the roof at the rear of the house, not visible from the street. The available documentation about this art environment says that this creation is based on a fairy tale about Mowgli.
This probably has to do with Mowgli and the snake Kaa, characters that initially appeared in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, a 1994 film in which Kaa is a friendly character. However, in later videos from other producers, Kaa was presented as the villain. It is not clear to which Kaa Krylov referred.
No comments:
Post a Comment