Sergey Pronin is a designer and designer, owner of the ProDesign trademark, a representative of CVR in Russia. Author of two books and two web collections on design and advertising. Candidate of Sociological Sciences.
Sergey Pronin:
“Prague is my favorite city, every time I find myself in it, I experience a very strong and deep feeling of a special place for me. I can just sit on a bench or wander the streets for hours. It seems that only my magnet is hidden here.
Fanatical enthusiasm for ornaments, sculptures, carvings echoes in me more and more with every visit to Prague. On one of these visits, when I was invited to work on the design of a restaurant located in the very center, on my free days I just walked the streets and endlessly looked at the facades: I was hunting for heads, more precisely, for mascarons! What for? Mascaron is one of the most amazing decor elements. It gives me pleasure to consider each new image, to see how it fits - from small to whole - into the overall style of the house. During five days of such walks, I explored hundreds of houses in the Zizkov and Vinohrady districts, of course, not to mention other places, but the first two - especially. This is an amazing experience.
Every house on my route was examined in detail: all cornices, mascarons, portals were photographed. No joke, I shot so many photographs of architectural details that I was afraid that my flash drive from the camera would weigh more than twenty kilograms allowed for one passenger! More than a thousand views of the most beautiful heads and figures, carved and stucco elements, all kinds of house ex-libris! I even got a crazy thought that the fifth book should be written no longer on my usual advertising and design theme. And so to call it - “Mascarons and Portals of Prague. Part One : there is clearly an abundance of material.
I carved my first mascaron in wood back in 2013, calling it “The Queen of May” (“Queen of the Forest Spirits”) - an image I invented in a pair with the most famous type of masks - “The King of May”.
He also tried to find new motives in modeling, for example, here is my "Greenman" with a bird.
Even in the winter in the forest or in the summer by the sea, I find time for heads!
This passion explains a whole essay on the Prague hunting for stone heads - I shot 300 mascarons, sorted this corpus of works and wrote a report for a whole year, raking hundreds and hundreds of pictures!
In 2015, the magazine "Vokrug Sveta" became interested in photographs and published some of my materials.
This year I was invited to work at a monastery near Prague, and, I must admit, in my free time I added several dozen more mascarons to my collection. The report is still in progress."
Personal website of Sergey Pronin - prodesign.ru
