Do you wanna come up and see my etchings?

I spent my lunch listening to a wonderfully inspiring woman who was just a little older than me but seemed to have achieved so much in her art career specialising in etchings.

Lacey nighties, hands, water, mazes, labrynths, female form, myths and legends. Just beautifully crafted.

Mila Judge-Furstova is a Czech artist who presented etchings and drawings reflecting her fascination with dreams and mythology. She explained how growing up during the communist Czech Republic was a strange time. It was interesting to hear what she went through as a child whilst I was in England. As a child she played in the woods with her friends and visited a blind lady alot who would reel off fascinating stories. Similar to the sort of things I used to get up to. The major diffference was that she was growing up in a time where the borders and limits of their country dictated where they couldn't go. Mila didn't see the sea until she was 16. Mila wa fortunate to gain a place in an art school in Prague and learnt English as well. During 1989 she said it was so exciting to be a part of the revolution and being a student at the forefront of the action.
Mila later came over to Cheltenham in 1996 to study at the Cheltenham & Gloucester College a year after I had left. She went onto the Royal College in London. Mila found London wonderful and at times she missed the open space of her Czech home. An illustration of a lizard/ comelian with rabbit ears depicted her yearning to blend in with the English natives but never quite making it.

One weird custom Mila told us about ;-

A custom of the Czechs at Easter is for the men to gather twigs bind them into a whip and at 6am in the morning knock on the doors of the women and whip them. This was to make the women folk fresh for the year!!!

I don't think so..


Now Mila is a resident artist at the Cheltenham Ladies College and has set up their etchings studio.