Midnight breakfast

(watercolor & acrylic illustration on paper, 2006)

"Once a woman has forgiven a man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast."
Marlene Dietrich

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll

"All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast."
John Gunther

"Only boring people are brilliant at breakfast."
Oscar Wilde

As a life-long admirer of both Dalí and Margitte I came to view eggs as something almost mythical. A perfectly shaped nature's miracle - an egg can symbolize a variety of things from the origin of life to the sun...

In my own culture, we (the Ukrainians) are famous for our painted Easter eggs. In pre-Christian Ukraine eggs were associated with a pagan sun god, an obvious association considering how much an egg yolk resembles the sun. Of course, those of us who were lucky enough to have seen a rare orange moon can claim that an egg yolk can also symbolize the moon.

I painted the Midnight Breakfast after I witnessed the biggest and the orangest moon that I've ever seen in my life. I was so impressed with its size and color that I felt the need to commemorate it with a painting. I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to paint and as I was organizing my paints I started thinking about one of my favorite movies - Moonstruck. It reminded me how often people sail through life unaware that their true love is waiting for them just around the corner if only they bothered to look there. I thought about all the people so involved with their careers and day-to-day lifes that they forget to even look for their other half. It's sad that modern people are so self-obsessed that the majority of them have forgotten that life is full of miracles, such as true love or a big orange moon.