A Summer-Fall Transition Outfit for SIA Hilma af Klint

Marsha at Marsha in the Middle is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected 1907 painting "The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood" by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. She chose this artwork because she wanted to find something different from her "pretty" norm for this challenge. Though she wasn't familiar with the artist or this work prior to some Internet searching, she liked that it was unlike anything she's presented before.

Source: marshainthemiddle.com

This painting has a lot going on...so I thought about what I have in my closet with similar colors and a busy print (rather than trying to pull in the many elements of the painting individually). Voila! This print looked like a good option. The mustard yellow flower even had a similar shape/color to the central figure of the artwork.

It's interesting that I chose this skirt because when I read about the Ten Largest collection of paintings, people kept mentioning the "botanical" forms and references in the artwork. So "botanical skirt" for the win!

An obvious way to use this skirt to build an outfit that interprets the painting would be to add a lot of yellow because the large figure in the center of the artwork is that color. But I had already done something very similar a year ago that I shared in my post about the Style Imitating Art challenge with the Pumpkin sculpture!

OOTD 9/26/24

So I chose to draw on a different color from the painting that gave me some real summer-fall transition season vibes: a green-teal hue that looks similar enough to the green..."botanical blobs"?...at the top of the artwork. As in the yellow-based outfit, I wore a modern twin set of a sleeveless tank and a lightweight sweater. Despite wearing the same skirt and the same color formula in both outfits, they look rather different to me! The yellow one is cheerful, bright, and (yes) sunny, while the green one is calm, soft, and verdant. I think it's strange that with all the variety in my closet, I happened to wear this same skirt on September 26 two years in a row. Coincidence? Destiny? Not sure, but it is really a perfect piece for the summer-fall transition so I can't complain.

OOTD 9/26/25

I kept my shoes very simple with a pair of black patent pointy-toed flats. I think this skirt looks good with black shoes, and I thought it would ground the outfit well.

It was the easiest thing in the world to get some extra "botanical blob" action into the outfit by wearing a DIY memory wire bracelet that I made specifically to match the skirt. I really could have worn a simple grey outfit (mimicking the background of the painting) accessorized with this bracelet and called it a day! :D

My layered necklace du jour was a lot of fun to put together, and I loved how it turned out! I'll break it down for you...

The shortest necklace is a DIY paper bead project that I also made to coordinate with this skirt. It kind of breaks my heart that I don't have page-to-bead photos to share, but I realized recently that I had made a bunch of beads for necklaces without photographing the process! The paper was a nice thick cover from an alumni magazine with a variety of green, orange, aqua, and black tones that don't match the skirt per se but do coordinate with it. The skirt, memory wire bracelet, and paper bead necklace make a nice little set.

The DIY seed bead wrap necklace and paper pendant featuring a trio of dogs were designed with a different item from my wardrobe in mind - a pair of plaid pants. But I liked the idea of bringing in just a hint of blue (to mimic the painting) with the necklace. The dog pendant just really popped against the green top so I included it even though it doesn't have any direct counterpart in the artwork. (Though who's to say for certain that none of those ambiguous shapes are dogs?) The flip side of the pendant is a trio of penguins in the same color scheme; these were two illustrations from the same magazine article so I decided to put them together on the pendant.

I finished up my layered necklace with a long multi-strand chain necklace in mixed metals (purchased from CJ Banks but it would be simple enough to make one!); I liked that the gunmetal chain brought more of the black color up into the outfit.

My earrings are a pair of the world's easiest DIY earrings made by placing some green-teal crystal beads in various shapes and round silver spacer beads on a pre-made earring hoop from Amazon. I had a lot going on with my necklaces and bracelet, so I just made some simple earrings that matched the color of my twin set; I made them on the round hoop to repeat that shape from the painting another time.

Now for the main event: revealing our Rabbit Imitating Art selection! With the grey background and the various softly rounded forms in the artwork, I could not resist this delightfully loafed and dewlapped Rex rabbit. This bunny color is called "blue" and you can see why - it definitely has slate blue look to the fur. This overall blue-grey fur color results from a rabbit with a dominant black gene having both two recessive "dilute" color genes (gives a faded look to the color so black becomes blue) and two recessive "self" genes (makes each hair just one color rather than a heathered blend of colors like you see on wild rabbits).

As Marsha explained in her post, Hilma af Klint began to embrace mysticism, the paranormal, and Kardecist spiritism after the death of her younger sister in 1880 (Kardec defined spiritism as "the doctrine founded on the existence, manifestations, and teachings of spirits"). She later belonged to a group of five female artists who believed in spirits called the "High Masters," who they communicated with through seances and automatic writing/drawing. She began to receive messages from these entities, including the 1906 assignment of creating a body of artwork called The Paintings for the Temple.

Interestingly, after the seance in which the High Master ordered the commission for the Temple paintings, the other women in the Five declined the assignment and "warned af Klint that the intensity of this kind of spiritual engagement could drive her into madness." Nevertheless, she persisted. The relationship between the High Masters and the works af Klint produced varied over the course of the project. She believed that some of the paintings were created directly through her by the spirits (particularly early in the project). In other cases, she received messages from the spirits but had more personal control over the creation of the art (particularly latter on). But the presence of these spirits was a constant: she noted that "I was to imagine that [the High Masters] were always standing by my side."

She stuck with The Paintings for the Temple project for about 10 years, amassing 193 paintings! After this, she continued to feel inspired by the spiritual realm but no longer operated under the guidance of entities like the High Masters.

While af Klint presumably sought divine inspiration and revelation from her interactions with the High Masters, what did they want? What did this "temple" refer to? Why did they want so many paintings in it?

These mysteries have now been solved! Recent communications with the spirit world have revealed that the High Masters' purpose for the temple and its many artworks was to provide a place for the contemplation of the unrivaled beauty and cosmic significance of rabbits! Through astral projection, bunnies would insert themselves into the paintings, thus completing the work started over 100 years ago by human artist Hilma af Klint.

Artwork "improved" with rabbit

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 Marsha in the Middle.

What colors would you have pulled from this painting to create an outfit? Do you like to wear botanical prints? Do you ever wear whimsical zoological prints or accessories like the dog trio pendant? Did anything about Hilma af Klint's artwork surprise you?

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