"Heritage after Rubens" Painting

GMS (Gocha Meg Stankiewicz) interior designer, painter and scriptwriter, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, taught classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. For years she has been painting the Heritage series. To legitimize their noble origins, it was a common custom for great Polish families to search for Roman ancestors. The Roman myth, transferred to coats of arms , compensated for the inferiority complex caused by the lack of knowledge about the nation's earliest history. Ancestors supposedly living in distant times were not hesitated to be invented. Heraldists matched existing stories with narratives borrowed from ancient writers. By peeling away the layers of Roman, Sarmatian and Lechitic legends from the coats of arms, one can discover ancient Polish myths. In my new series Heritage I ilustrare Slavic myths found in coasts of arms using characters and situations drawn from European painting. Creating a new quality and a new myth allows me to belive that I am an heir to European culture.