Salazar at 14 Shades of Grey is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected the 1909 oil painting Portrait of the Painter Anton Peschka by Austrian Art Nouveau/Expressionist artist Egon Schiele. Salazar liked the pink and other muted colors in the palette for the month of Valentine's Day and the warming of the weather as we approach spring. She called this challenge Egon Schiele 2.0 since the artist was featured on SIA in the past (before my time).
I quickly settled on a pink and grey color palette for my outfit to pick up the grey wall and pink suit, but wasn't sure how I wanted to interpret the print (patchwork?) chair with what looks like coral-pink leaves growing around and within it. Luckily I have this knit pencil skirt with a mixed chevron and floral print in a cheerful spring/summer color combination that blends the geometric and organic elements of the chair/leaves. To add some further pattern mixing to my look, I selected a floaty summer scarf with a bright floral print.
For the pink part of my outfit, I selected a modern twin set consisting of a long-sleeved T and puffy vest in the blush pink-adjacent "light sepia rose" color from CJ Banks. (I wore this vest in an SIA challenge last month, too!)
For the grey part of my outfit, I wore medium grey tights and textured ankle boots. In my recent post about wearing a print summer skirt in winter, I discussed how easy it is to style a print skirt that has a dark neutral in it because you can pick up that color with your tights and boots. But what do you do with a skirt like this that is all light colors? White tights and boots has a weird old-school nurse uniform vibe to me so that's out. Maybe someone with bolder taste than I would pick out a bright accent color and go with that. Perhaps the purple color could coordinate with burgundy but that still feels overly intense. I have tried oatmeal/beige tights and tan boots with this skirt and really don't like how they look; they are in the uncanny valley of looking too much like my skin color but weirdly textured and overall school uniform-y. But this grey looks very nice to me! Using Jodie's "color recipe" concept, I went with A Neutral Not in the Print.
I tied my lightweight scarf using method #5: loop to the front with ends brought through as described in this post. I looped it through several times to create a ruffled jabot-like effect. As is usual for me, I filled some of the vacant space below my short scarf with a long necklace...well, technically several layered necklaces: a long seed bead wrap necklace I made specifically for this skirt plus some long silver-tone chains. I added a safety pin bail with a little white bead dangle to hold the chains in place. I like how the seed bead necklace creates a color connection between the scarf and the skirt.
My daily bracelet stack features a paper bead bracelet set in orchid and light green that I made to coordinate with this skirt. I showed these paper bead bracelets in a very different bracelet stack along with page to bead photos in a post this past summer. The previous stack was filled in with light green and black bracelets, but this time I used silver, grey, and dark pink colors instead. {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}
The paper bead bracelet stack inspired me to design a pair of easy DIY bead soup stack earrings to match, which I created using textured glass beads in light pink, light green, and charcoal grey, small gunmetal spacers, and silver butterfly beads to repeat that motif from the charm on the top bracelet. I wore a light pink DIY braided t-shirt headband to match my twin set.
The DIY jewelry in today's outfit is a great example of my idea that if you wear a lot of print clothing, making jewelry pieces that specifically coordinate with those print items will help you design jewelry that you will wear again and again. The skirt inspired the paper bead bracelet set and the seed bead wrap necklace. Then the bracelet set inspired the earrings. Put them all together, and you have a spiffy little beauty bundle/accessory set ready to provide color-integrated finishing touches to outfits using the skirt. But of course you're not limited to wearing a set like this all at the same time or only with the print clothing that inspired it! I'm imagining a color-blocked outfit in some combination of pink, green, and teal solid pieces accessorized with this jewelry, for example.
Now for my favorite part of the post: revealing our Rabbit Imitating Art selection! I wanted a bunny that was reminiscent in some way of the subject of the portrait, the painter Anton Peschka, with his dark hair and vaguely downcast yet thoughtful expression. This black Polish rabbit with his somewhat stiff posture looked right to me.
Schiele and Peschka had a long relationship...or what counts for "long" given that Schiele died of Spanish flu in 1918 at age 28.
Egon Schiele and his best friend, fellow painter Anton Peschka, whom he had met in 1906 at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, shared the same fate in their years of artistic training: having to suffer the conservative mentality of Professor Christian Griepenkerl. Their mutual antipathy led them to opposition and ultimately caused them to leave the Akademie in 1909 together with similarly minded fellow artists and form the Neukunstgruppe. This artists' group was meant to give them creative freedom without academic dogma. Trips to places like Krumau and the exchange of experiences in conversations and letters formed an integral part of their friendship. A number of Peschka's early works were strongly influenced by Schiele. In 1912/13, Peschka worked in the studio of the set painter AntonÃn Brioschi. In 1914, he married Schiele's sister Gerti. (source)
Anton put on a spiffy suit and sat in an armchair for his best friend Egon to paint him. He had a lot on his mind what with the two of them having quit art school to form their own independent art movement celebrating a break from tradition and the need for each artist to carry within himself the foundations for his work. Egon had written a manifesto and everything. It was all very exciting, wasn't it? And he would always follow where Egon led, wouldn't he? Yet he felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction, of unease, even.
Maybe it was the name of the movement: The New Art Group. It sounded quite generic and bland, which wasn't at all in line with the ideas and artwork and lifestyle they were going for. They were going to create artwork that was audacious and sexy and colorful, and they were going to strike out on their own...just like Gustav Klimt! Right? Yes, they were going to be remarkable individual talents who were also "Klimt Lads" and that was okay. More than okay. There was nothing weirdly contradictory about the idea of an artist being "himself by all means...directly and solely within himself" and being a follower of his best friend who is a follower of someone else. Sure, this painting that he's sitting for is going to look to a person 115 years in the future like some kind of Klimt knock-off but that wasn't wrong, was it? Sticking with Egon, his own work was going to look like knock-offs of knock-offs but...well, damn.
This all made so much sense when Egon explained it, but in his own head, the ideas got twisted up. He just needed to stick close to Egon for the rest of his life and things would remain clear.
In looking for more information about Anton Peschka, I came across this image of a circa 1900 watercolor of his called Autumn Vine Tendril that is described thus:
The influence of Egon Schiele, the artist’s brother-in-law, is evident in this fine watercolour, as it is in much of Anton Peschka’s work. (source)
So how this comes across to me is that Anton Peschka painted this autumn vine tendril in the style of his friend Egon Schiele, who about 9 years later painted a portrait of his friend Anton that included the autumn vine tendril wrapping itself up into the armchair where Anton sat...right into its foundations, one might say. Very intertwined.
For much more information about the painter Egon Schiele, check out Marsha's informative (and sometimes rather disturbing!) post.
Thanks for joining me today for this Style Imitating Art + Rabbit Imitating (and Improving) Art post!
To see other outfit interpretations of this artwork, check out the review on 14 Shades of Grey.
What color of tights/boots would you have chosen to wear with this summery print skirt? Do you like clothing or accessories that have a print mix built into them? Are you ready for spring weather? Spring colors?
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