"The Biggest Ball" (150x100cm acrylic on canvas) is inspired by the scandalous life of an old millionaire playboy Richard Lugner, owner of the Lugner City, known to having married and divorced young and beautiful ladies in Vienna, Austria. Richard is also known for sponsoring and inviting popular celebrities to the most fabulous Opera Ball in Vienna, such as, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ornella Muti, Elle Macpherson, Kim Kardashian, Harry Belafonte, Sophia Loren, Jacqueline Bisset, Nadja abd el Farrag and many more.
It wasn't actually my idea to paint Richard Lugner's scandalous life, it's the suggested idea of my exclusive art gallerist, Hubert Thurnhofer, who is just like Richard Lugner, one of the federal presidential candidates in the Austrian Presidential Election. Hubert's idea is rather humorous but requires an impossible angle for me to illustrate: humongous female chest of one of Richard's scandalous Opera Ball's guests, so huge and heavy that could collapse the horse carriage that would take them to the fabulous ball. What angle of female chest could that be? Front or sideview? I couldn't figure it out myself, without sacrificing the true-to-life illustration that makes sense. It started as a joke, however, I finally agreed to take the challenge of painting another person's idea rather than myself as an artist. Art, for me, is anyways illustrating the impossible imagination in clear images. To begin with, I made quick sketches of the desired preliminary images on a loose paper, fastly drawing the figures as if I was scared to skip any single relevant element needed for the completion of this painting, thereby solving the problem of required realistic angle, to make something impossible possible.
There was no definite plan to the entire completion of the painting. I started with the caricature of Richard in the middle of the canvas and it progressed into my own imagination of the plot, the imagination of a rich old man surrounded by elegant women in their gowns, who are stuck in the middle of the road because of the weight of their chests, which I referred to as the ball, "The Biggest Ball."
At its background on the right side is my miniature Fairy Tales interpretation of the Fairy Godmother and Cinderella being taken by the carriage to the Opera Ball, and on the left side was Sleeping Beauty and the 7 drawfs on their way to the same ball during one strange beautiful evening that has never been seen before.
The only obvious guy in tuxedo is Richard Lugner himself, who is stressed out with the demands of his imaginary wife in the carriage, and of course, the representation of the Biggest Ball, the blonde woman in yellow gown, whom everyone guessed as Paris Hilton, whose Biggest Ball looks like being poked by the needle by a naughty woman in green. But if you carefully analyze it, the woman in green is merely strangely drawing something on the carriage floor.
The beauty of the blue horses being pampered by the woman in orange gown, and instead of a a male coachman, an elegant coachwoman. However, all the women in the painting are not a representation of different women and celebrities in the life of Richard Lugner. They are all just imaginary characters.
"The Biggest Ball was exhibited in a gallery in Vienna and luckily seen by the Press photographer of Richard Lugner.
He has shown him a photo of this painting, which he took himself during the exhibit and Richard, who is an architech, immediately fell in love with it. Richard wasn't aware that during the final sale negotiation of it, I was undergoing a serious operation in the hospital. I never thought that in this exhibition I would see for the last time this painting in person. If i could have died after the operation, i wouldn't have known that the painting has a new owner. Richard proudly hangs this painting in his office room until now, and "The Biggest Ball" was often seen as a background of his Press interviews shown on television in Austrian channels, and hopefully being enjoyed everytime by celebrity guests of Richard in his office.
