In the year 1895, the Czechoslovakian artist Alphonse Maria Mucha rose to dizzying heights of stardom. The design for the advertising poster for the Fifth Avenue, Broadway theatre production of Gismonda that opened on December 11th and ran until February 1895 would be the making of him. This prototypical production starred the then young and stunning actress Sarah Bernhardt and Lucien Guitry as Almerio.
My first encounter with Mucha’s work was at a very young age. I would spend many hours with my grandmother, chatting and looking at magazines and books. One afternoon we sat in her large sunny bedroom, the light from the wide bay window making the flowers on the Sanderson wallpaper dance and sing. And if my memory serves me well, Granny opened up a magazine that was running a feature on the works of Alphonse Mucha. Those moments come rarely, do they not, when your heart flutters with delight at what you see before you in a picture. I was captured by the patterns, colors, flowers, and poses of his elegant ladies.
With darling Granny’s love of ballet, classical music, Liberty print, and the Arts and Crafts movement it would be no surprise that a young Tiggy, (her pet name for me), would fall in love with what Granny coveted.
So, if we move forward many years, those influences live on in my own artwork.
Recently I had a piece exhibited at the Ashbourne Historical Centre, for which I am thankful.
My influence came from Mucha and a passion for nature in all its never-ending glory.
Within this painting, I wanted to bring the delights of the Derbyshire Dales’ beauty to life in art. Blossoms and flowers link us to the surrounding flower meadows, left uncut. The choice of red hair for my lady who sits at the center of the piece associates the picture with my love for Scotland. According to the renowned historical researcher and author Freddy Silva, auburn locks are linked to the “shining Ones”, an ancient people that connects Scotland and the red hair gene through the country’s neolithic past which you can read more about in his latest book “Scotland’s Hidden Sacred Past”.
Ashbourne is where the Jacobites, headed by the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, announced his father to be King James III on the town’s cobbled marketplace. Within his unfortunate campaign to bring down the Hanoverian Kings.
The long triangles of bunting that border the gouache painting, quite muted at the edge of my design on board represent the triangular bunting that flies in the wind yearlong above Ashbourne High Street.
But all in all, the piece is just for Ashbourne as it is today, and all the beautiful countryside and magic that sits in the surrounding ancient landscape.
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