‘I started digging’: Europeana’s collections inspire new art

Artist Cosmina Berta tells us how she browses the Europeana website for artistic inspiration. Cosmina bases her artworks on cultural heritage imagery, enhancing and reimagining it using both digital and traditional techniques.

Hi, Cosmina. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into creating art.

For me, art is more than a hobby. I grew up in communist Romania when artists had to teach in schools. So we had very famous artists teaching us and I was inspired by them and their passion. One teacher came to school and drew magic birds from stories, and I started to draw like she did. I never stopped.

I’m from Romania and I came to live in Germany in 2000. I think of myself as a European citizen. When I came to Germany, I was a bit lonely and art was my refuge. I started working for the German Digital Library and discovered its pictures, and Europeana.eu’s too. I was practically amazed by these pictures, and I wanted to show them to the world, to give them new life, to craft a dialogue between the past and the present. I also learn a lot myself about the events and the people shown in the pictures.

In 2013, I saw some Europeana blogs that used fashion photos from Gallica - I loved the style, the dressing, the atmosphere - and so I started digging. And I found more things I liked. I found pictures taken by a press agency in the 1910s-20s. The flavour of the pictures was so different then. Such as pictures taken during a solar eclipse with people silhouetted against the sky. I mixed them with patterns and made collages that I transferred onto wooden panels I’d found. Wood is organic and warm, it has its own story. Gallica has restrictions on how you can use their collections, so I got in touch with them to clarify how I could use them in my art. I put five pictures in a coffee shop and I sold four of them.

One buyer studied geography and saw contour lines of topographic maps in the pattern I added. She saw something in it that I hadn’t.

Then I started adding stories to the pictures and in 2020, just before the pandemic, I did my first art show, with three stories about three pictures. One of these was about a ship. I added a red pattern to its sails and the story is about how the ship lost its sails.

What has been your best find on Europeana.eu so far?

A set of portraits of Michel Fokine, a choreographer. When he died in 1942, his choreography for Les Sylphides was performed in 17 opera houses around the world as a tribute to him. He worked in the 1920s, 30s and 40s and his work is still being used today, but I imagine people have forgotten the man behind the dances. I added harlequin patterns and colours to his portrait because I thought it should be colourful and happy. I could work in so many ways with the five or six photos there are of him. I could do an art show just with him.

I also love the pattern papers featured in a blog about books that had been restored. I combined one of these with a portrait of three sisters. The person I sold this to said it reminded them of a feminist version of Lenin, Marx and Engels. I love how other people see things that I don’t see. It’s fascinating. These pictures are so relatable, they communicate, and people see a story and relate it to themselves.

How do you use Europeana.eu?

I like Europeana.eu because I don’t have to search for things on ten different websites. Everything is there. I know how to use the facets and the search and the rights statements. You have to find stuff that clicks for you, and it clicks very often with the pictures in Europeana.

I like looking through the blogs, and when I search, I start very broadly looking for all images with an open licence. That’s it. Then I go with the flow.

Where else do you find or share your inspiration?

I don’t follow people on social media. I follow museums. Every visit to an art show or to a museum changes my direction a little bit.

As do conversations with people. A friend of mine’s house flooded, and she gave me a piece of floorboard that had been damaged in the flood. I transferred a collage of butterflies onto it and made it optimistic and colourful. I wanted her to have something bright to take away the bad memories.

Sometimes I like to let technique take control. I work with Photoshop to cut out images and it can see nuances of colour that I cannot see, so I let the software do it. It’s a combination between human and machine and this works very well for me.

I use Photoshop and Illustrator to work with the images, and I like Medium for sharing my stories. I also share my work on Instagram, and my art is listed on the Saatchi Art website but I don’t have my own website.

I also work in a gallery with 10 people. Everyone’s styles are very different but we inspire each other a lot, in how we use patterns, various techniques, or in the harmony of colours. It’s good to be in a community and to have that exchange of ideas. And it’s great to have input from the people who look at the pictures. It’s like reading tea leaves, I read one thing and someone else reads something else.

What is influencing your work right now?

I’d say 90% of my art is of women. One series is based on pictures from a Europeana blog featuring images of women on a seashore. I used them to make pictures that I found optimistic and uplifting.

But people still need to fight for their rights. In the 2000s we all thought we had gained some ground, but apparently not. I want to communicate this in my art. I want to convey energy, freedom, reflection, hope, inspiration! In my collages with old masters like Rembrandt, I noticed that most women are looking down, they’re very submissive. I’m doing a series now with pictures from the 1930s and 40s because they are starting to be released with open licences. They have a different atmosphere, they’re communicating differently - the women in the pictures from these times are starting not to look down any more.