Mucha

MUCHA

LOOKING AT THE ARTIST AND CREATING

One of my favourite artists is Alphonse Mucha a czech art nouveau painter. Art Nouveau is a style organic and flowing in style used in painting and also design and decoration. Mucha's symbolic paintings turn women into goddesses of nature and the earth.
I took his images and contrasted them with sharper angular images.

Detached from Nature
Contrasting Mucha's painting in its organic splendor with a film reel representative of technology.

Curves and Shapes
These days it is fashionable to be skinny, despite the fact that most of us are a little rounder than skin and bones. Many would blame the fashion industry for what is classed as beautiful today. I do think it probably originated from there but I think it is emphasised and made worse by marketing, media, music industries and film industries.
In fashion, designers design for different reasons and one of those reasons is as an outlet (they design clothes just as an artist paints a picture) and therefore when displaying their designs nothing works better than a very straight up and down canvas,  rounder woman takes the eye away from the garment - in fact one designer once said if he could he would use magic coat hangers to float down the catwalk to display his clothes. Outside of fashion our natural shape is not a size 16, primitively we spent time exercising our bodies more than we do today hunting and gathering. Convenience and technology allows us a more comfy life.
Notice the background is angular and jutting in contrast to the flowing shape of the lady.

Curves and Shapes 2
Another contrasting image with the flowing shapes in the ladies dress and the angular background.

Tango Curves
Using a modern image of two tango dancers arranged with a decorative wave from one of Mucha's paintings. The contrast exists in the passion and ferocity of the dancers to the flowing shape of the wave that overcomes them.