Inspiration: Pastoral Paintings

Often times, art is where I turn to for my first source of inspiration because it helps evoke a mood. I am particularly drawn to pastoral and bucolic paintings, depicting the kind of life some deep part of me really longs for. Perhaps it's not that deep. I have been moved to tears seeing the sun glisten on grain dancing in the breeze, to sun light piercing through the clouds giving everything around it a Heavenly glow. Perhaps in a past life I was a landscape painter.

Carl Thomsen, "Landscape with Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow", 1896

Anyhow, paintings so often begin the design journey for me. Sometimes it inspires the thought of "Oh, I'd like to design a dress that looks or feels like this..." or "if I were in this painting, what would I wear?"

I think I am so drawn to these types of paintings because they depicted something that was real and something out of control of human hands. The landscape existed and was just. Sure, some painters may have taken their own liberties to remove a fallen tree, perhaps they altered the light so it's a different time of day, slightly... I believe painters these as they were, and that is what I find even more precious about them. Paintings are not like a photograph where you take a few seconds and capture the moment. To paint a landscape, one had had to sit and be in the world they were painting for days, weeks, months at a time.

Francis Coates Jones (1857-1932), "Waiting", National Academy of Design, New York, NY