An Ode to Art – Discoveries of the World

A brand new artwork in Kristjana’s best-selling Navigator’s Map series, designed upon a navigational map that guided 16th century travellers. This enlightening map artwork celebrates the pivotal art movements that guided the history of painting in early Europe. From the gothic and romanesque of the Medieval period to the dreamlike confusion of Surrealism, each art movement is represented by Kristjana’s hero animals, plotted amongst the continents of the world.

The horse was a recurring subject in Medieval paintings, mixed with tales of knights and mystical creatures, and so here Kristjana presents a white unicorn, its bejewelled sword sheaved in a kingly belt. From the ancient to a time of re-birth, Da Vinci’s allegorical Renaissance portrait, ‘Lady with an Ermine’ is evoked through the actual animal, complete with jewels and headdress. Opposite sits a graceful ‘man-lion’, conjuring the power of monarchs during the Baroque period. A pair of Dali-esque elephants tiptoe their way on spindly legs, stretching dreamlike to their gargantuan bodies.

The tools of the painter; tubes, pencil and brush, are transported across flower-carpeted continents upon the wings of kaleidoscopic butterflies, trains and boats. The abundant blooms evoke the spirit of art as well as its most prominent masters. ‘Plumeria’ symbolises art’s constant search for perfection; ‘poppy’ denotes the power of the imagination and its ability to head into oblivion; sunflowers and iris, the flowers loved by artists from Van Gogh to Georgia O’Keefe. French impressionist painter Monet famously declared that the true colour of the atmosphere was violet – here his beloved waterlilies sit beneath a violet cloudburst that carries the instruments of art by ship from age to age.