Textual Poaching

My Remix of Mucha's The Seasons

Original of The Seasons

The piece of art that I decided to remix was Mucha’s four seasons. Mucha paints and many of his painting feature art nouveau depictions of women. Mucha was trying to convey what the new women was in this time period and to celebrate her femininity. I really enjoy Mucha’s paintings and I find them to be extremely beautiful; that’s why I gravitated towards his work. I chose The Seasons by Mucha because it focuses on the women and different interpretations of the seasons as women. As I thought of Mucha’s work and what he wanted it to represent I thought that I could represent myself in addition to what the new woman is today.

I wanted to represent that the idea of a new woman today is this idea that we have many sides and are dynamic in our thoughts, wants, and needs. I then took this idea and tried to represent this with pieces of Mucha’s work. Instead of having four panels of seasons I wanted to have four panels each with a different side of my personality. I focused on having a quiet, a loud, a giving, and a selfish side. I wanted to highlight that I am all of these things and not just one of them all the time. I did this remix through using Powerpoint it has the easiest way to remove the background and I was able to layer the images. I did this and then when I was finished I put the powerpoint in present mode and then took a screenshot of my screen to create an image. I am a dynamic woman and I have things that I do and love, but I don’t do them all the time. I am not loud all the time and often I enjoy the quiet time that I need. I took things that represent those categories to me and underlaid them to the women from The Seasons. I kept the panels and retitled the panels to represent what I had done.

I felt it was important to document the idea that myself and women in general can be multiple things at the same time because throughout history women are often painted in a what is thought to be the ideal of the time. Often times it focuses on physical beauty and being attractive to the eye. I wanted stray away from what the ideal of this time would be and focus on a real representation of who I am and the idea that women can be more than just beautiful. I wanted my remix to focus on what women are and not just what we want them to be. Women are lots of things and often they aren’t perfect. I included the selfish and giving because this is something that is really prevelant in my life. I am constantly making choices about who I am and what I choose to do; I am not one or the other all the time. I wanted to includes some flaws of mine to ground my work in reality and not what the ideal version of myself would be.