In the Artist’s Words
You may encounter it in the earliest of mornings. The Sunbird will be there, guarding people’s dreams with unmatched warmth. A being that can be encountered during sunrise, a creature that treads along the blurry line between night and day, dreams and reality. This is my Sunbird, resting on the apple tree branch, gently shining its light onto a happy woman in Ukrainian clothing.
Born out of my love and fascination for fairy tales, the Sunbird is an amalgamation of symbols and meanings. In Ukrainian, which is my native language, its name is a kind of wordplay. It’s called ”сонце птиця” – which means the ”sun bird”, but add one more space there, and it becomes ”сон це птиця”, which means ”sleep is a bird”. Sunbird has a sun-like feather halo around its head and bright fiery colours, but it’s also similar to an owl when you look at its face and overall shape.
It’s a piece of art that I’ve spent several weeks meticulously rendering, filling up each little detail with as much love and magic as I could. The Sunbird is my ode of love for slavic folklore and mythos, my ‘thank you’ to the many fairy tale books with enticing stories and stunning illustrations that fascinated me as a child and drove me to see magic and mystery in every bit of the world. I hope I captured those feelings well in the drawing, so that others may feel it too.
About the Artist:
Iryna Iaroshenko is a freelance designer and illustrator born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is a recent graduate and an aspiring artist in search of creative work. Her passions lie within explorations of slavic history, culture, and mythology, and she strives to reflect a fairy-tale feeling in her creations. You may find her on behance, or under the username @lacrim_iris on twitter or instagram.