Koktebel

1/ The Family Bore

Maybe some of you saw that very funny-yet-moody totally great 2006 American movie called Bubbah Ho-Tep.

At one point the old man just died and the daughter is there, checking at his stuff.
She falls on his Purple Heart, has a glimpse at it and throws it in the wastebasket.
Now guys, what will happen to our beloved dioramas when we will all be resting in peace?
I am living in such a world that I fear it could be totally alien to other people, that what I am doing and the possible beauty that I can find in my dioramas just could appeal to nobody else than me and the dozen of people that cheer me up every time I post some stuff in a forum.
I have no illusion about what will happen to my dioramas when I pass out, and stupidly, I happen to care about that.
Now I remind my great grand father, a Parisian seller who fancied himself being an artist –and indeed he was a quite gifted porcelain painter. He painted hundreds of them.
So it's been a few years that every Christmas, my mum tries to slip me one or 2 plates alongside more useful stuff in my yearly loot. Why does his stuff is being passed from generation to another while the Purple Heart ends up in the dustbin? Hey that's because great grandpa painted birds, nature, women with red faces and big asses running through fields… timeless stuff, stuff that pleases to women.
So maybe I found a goal with my dioramas, if I were about to disarm them, maybe they will turn me into this century's family bore? maybe I would still be somewhat reminded in 2100?

2/ A walk in the park with Aivazovski.

At the time I started this diorama, I had just finish a very big one of the “A bridge too far” kind.
Even if it ended being quite satisfactory, the amount of time and energy I spent building it was certainly too much I could afford. So I decided that one would be a walk in the park, something very simple, yet a bit new and daring.
First I wanted to do everything by myself in that one –which would have include the figures- and to use all my abilities to create outstanding water.
One evening while checking at my reference books –which include more painter’s monographs than Osprey-like books, I dig out one of my favourite, about Russian painter Ivan Aivazovski, a guy that devoted his life to paint the sea and the boats on it.
Now this XIXth century Russian painter is a bit of a hit and miss in my opinion.
His best paints (“The Seventh Wave”, “The Black Sea”) certainly reach Turner’s kneecap, but a lot of his work is just a bit too much affected for my own tastes.
But then there’s a big Something about his work. This guy knows the sea. He paints them with colour and movement. Man he’s been there… But then a lot of his colours are the powerful ones that you get at dawn or sunset and there is supposed to be no way that you can reproduce that in a diorama as you can’t display any background unless you build a shadow box around.
And it’s by thinking about this problem with the help of very good music that I decided that I would simply bypass it. I would make a sea shore –probably complete with a boat- but still I would use the warm colours that you get on summer’s evenings...

3/About a diorama being first an idea and then finding a suitable vehicle to go with it and not the opposite

Wanting to use a kid that would be at the middle of the scene, I needed a very special kind of boat, it had to be *thin* like an arrow so that my main character would not be crushed visually by a lumpy sloop.
Then in remembered the very first page on my book about Russian Torpedo boats, which shows a couple of very thin wooden boats with some kind of pole at the front.. After some enquiries in a forum, a nice modeller sent me very tight looking plans taken from a Russian magazine showing this really fine XIXth century boat called the Folly which I immediately visualized as a very handsome wreck.
Doing the plans for the diorama afterwards was a walk in the park because everything had to be done scale wise according to the kid that would be at the middle.
So that would not be a big diorama because, however empty it could be, the eye would be invariably attracted with some other details otherwise. So I set up for a 22cmx16 base which would be perfect. I then used my desktop printer to get a few top views of the Folly which I cut with some scissors and proceeded to arrange the scene so that the whole could look okay. 

My first idea was to do some kind of first plan/middle plan/ background kind of diorama. Here it would have been sea /kid and boat/ sand as a background.
But then I already had done a diorama with the same shapes some 10 years ago, and remembered the reasons why I wasn’t totally happy with it.
First a diorama is not a painting; it’s a 360° object which should be viewable from every angle without any effort, so the idea to put a background would be certainly very bad because it would have close the view of the spectator from one side (maybe 3 if I wouldn’t be careful), and it was something I totally wanted to avoid.
So I choose to arrange the totality of the elements, sea, bits of boats and sand so that those could kind of revolve around the kid, just like he was at the middle of a semi-chaotic scene.
Then as I wanted to create a special light effect, I choose a colour setting –the waves would be deep blue with the tip of the waves being of a much lighter shade –with maybe a little bit of red. As the sun would be setting, the bottom of the landscape would have rose-purple shades while the higher ground would have a nice yellow-orange sand tint.
The boat would be clearer on the top than on the bottom, while the light would be coming from the sea. The kid’s shirt would have to be white so that this colour could stand up near darker shades, especially the blue of the sea.

4/A little bit of history and the whereabouts of the “Folly”

For years I have been seeing Aivazovski’s sunken boats with heaps of people wearing red turbans on rafts and wondered why he didn’t like turbans up to that point. But then I discovered that there has been no love lost between Russia and Turkey for the whole XIXth century.
Now if there are very few clever wars, some leave some kind of weird taste in the mouth when you read about them. The Russo-Turkish war of 1876-1877 belongs to those ones.
It has been described by some historians as being “the war between the One Eyed and the Blind”.
The One Eyed won, after huge amount of blood spent in the mountains, victorious Russian troops entered deep inside Turkey –only to be spoiled of the benefits of the victory by hungry France and Great Britain that didn’t want Russia to be able to go as far south.
The only benefits Russia got from that war was to find a few more ideas to name their boats: Izmail and Makarov between others.
Stepan Makarov is indeed a man worth of interest.  The Russian Black Sea fleet was away in the Mediterranean Sea when the war started and was forbidden under threat by the English and French to go back to the Black Sea where it could take action against a sizable Turkish float. Staying in the Black Sea were a few coastal boats along with Stepan Makarov with his homemade torpedoboat tender –with improvised torpedo boats equipped with long poles with mines attached to one end, he managed to damage several Turkish ships on some night strikes.
From what I could translate from Russian, or even check, the Folly attacked and damaged the Turkish steamer/Ironclad Fethi Bulend. Not a major victory but the threat from Makarov’s handful of small ships got the Turkish fleet to stay out of action during the whole war.
The Folly is a very interesting ship also because of its former history: built in England by Thornycroft for the crown prince, future emperor Alexander III for his Black Sea residence at Livadia, the boat was handed over to the fleet shortly before the beginning of that war as there was a large need for fast mine boats to fight Turks.
Now like told me one friend in a forum “Russians, like most eastern Europeans, fix up stuff until the molecular structure breaks down and falls apart to dust.” So it is not impossible that the boat would have keep on floating for a good half of a century, only to be left rusting in the 1910’s. Now we are in the early nineteen-twenties, and there’s a kid at the middle of its decaying hull, near the Koktebel bay in Crimea.