Iron City Alchemy

one of the coolest things that i got for chronnika was a book of mucha images, which i asked for after being blown away by his museum in prague. the big, famous poster prints are pretty cool, but they can definitely be kind of cheesy and heavily laden with a certain type of scantily clad woman. i didn't know, before visiting the museum, that he was also an amazing renderer and object designer. he did absolutely gorgeous sketches of plants, people, and things he designed, using tiny lines of black and white (pencil? charcoal?). apparently some people objected to his work during his life because it was too frivolous, but i don't know; while i agree that people should think about challenging things i think there are plenty of ways to encourage that other than art. when i see something ugly that obviously took an amazing amount of effort to create, i wonder why that person didn't put that effort into making the world a more beautiful place. mucha certainly did that, and he and his imitators have been a big influence on my art. my biggest challenge in thinking about this is to take inspiration but not be too derivative, which can be tough.