The most defining work of art that changed me...




Is my grandmothers curtain.

Ohhh yes.

I spent hours ogling this curtain from the very first moment I can remember. Which is somewhere during the first year of my life. I used to nap on the couch facing this curtain. The sun shone through it on it's way down in all the colors of the fall.

Granny still has this curtain, it's falling apart, and when she got it it was nothing special. For most people it still isn't. It's just little OCD me who drools when thinking about it.
It was a typical socialist era textile from Czechoslovakia from the seventies. And yet, it's the most defining piece of art when it comes to inspiration for me..

Grandma still has it and one day it will be mine. It's falling apart but I don't care.

See ,the thing about this curtain, is that to me it portrays a magical forest. There are no animals or people in these simple repeating patterns, but I always knew they live INSIDE it. And the whole world that exist around the magical woods. I can close my eye and imagine a universe around this .

This curtain took over my soul and weaved itself into a magical wonderland I daydreamed about.
ThenI moved away to America when I was 19,not to see it again for a long time and so it haunted me.
It's patterns, representations of textures wanted out.

And they did . And they do. In everything I ever make they are there. This is where my dreams live, in these woods.


I did not have a picture of the curtain for a long time, when I visited Grandma 4 years ago, I finally took some. Not very good,but at least I have them outside of my head too.

So while this is someone else's artwork, and I wish I knew Who's it is, it still counts as inspiration, right?
I suppose everything can serve as inspiration. Nature, art, babies, moose scat(apparently there is a festival in Talkeetna, Alaska dedicated to inspiration drawn from this most noble substance), and as long as You put inspiration through the filter of imagination, it's all good.



I will try to take pictures of things the great curtain inspired me to make.

Besides this curtain the artist I often draw inspiration from is Klimt ( can you see why?)

I am planning to do an Art Nouveau piece soon.

I can't help it. Textures got the best of me again....

Comments

  1. Kinga, this is a lovely story :) Tells a lot about you as a person :) Thank you for sharing.

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