This series of five oil paintings is based on a piece of music called “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky although I confess I was inspired by a version by prog dinosaurs Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Mussorgsky himself was apparently inspired by works at an exhibition in St Petersburg by Viktor Hartmann. So, a piece of music based on paintings and paintings based on it:

The Baba Yaga story ties in with the fairy tale themes in a lot of the work I was doing when I painted these (note the hut with the chicken’s legs which seems to be something Russian children find frightening). I thought it would be interesting to run a story through the five pictures so the same characters can be found in each. This gets very complicated when the first four pictures turn up at an exhibition, with the characters again in the crowd viewing them.