200 Hours, One Brush: Painting Catherine of Aragon in the Art Nouveau Style

There are paintings you finish, and then there are paintings that finish you. This one is the second kind.

After roughly 200 hours of work — all of it with a single small brush — I've completed the first piece in a new series: six portraits, one for each queen of Six the Musical, each rendered in the ornate, gilded language of Art Nouveau. This one is Catherine of Aragon, played by Gerianne Perez, and it's the piece I'm proudest of to date.

Why Catherine, Why First

Every series needs a starting point, and Catherine felt like the right one. She's the queen who sets the emotional and historical tone for the whole show — dignified, devout, and quietly unshakeable even as everything around her falls apart. That steadiness is exactly what drew me to the Art Nouveau style for this project. Artists like Alphonse Mucha built entire worlds around their subjects: halos of pattern, crowns of ornament, women rendered as icons as much as individuals. It felt like the natural visual language for queens.

So Catherine got a gilded arch instead of a stage backdrop. A crown of stylized rays and florals instead of a spotlight. Filigree instead of a costume rack. The goal wasn't to copy Mucha, but to let his sensibility — that fusion of portrait and ornament, of a real person becoming a symbol — carry the weight the character deserves.

The Brush That Did Everything

Here's the part people usually don't believe: the entire piece was painted with one small brush. No separate tools for backgrounds versus detail work, no switching to something broader for the big washes of gold and umber in the border. Just one brush, doing the work of many, for 200 hours.

That decision wasn't about masochism — it was about consistency. A single brush forces a single hand language across the whole canvas. The same mark-making that built up the tiny curls of hair also laid in the sweeping arcs of the halo. It's slower, sometimes painfully so, but it means the piece reads as one continuous gesture rather than a patchwork of techniques. You can feel it holds together in a way that's hard to fake.

Where the Hours Went

Art Nouveau punishes impatience. The style lives or dies in its linework — every curl of hair, every twist of vine, every repeating motif in the border has to stay confident and unbroken, and one wrong pass can undo an afternoon of work. The lace bodice alone took an enormous chunk of the total time; getting that scrollwork to feel embroidered rather than just drawn meant building it up in careful, patient layers.

The face was its own challenge in the opposite direction — not ornamental restraint, but the need for real presence. Gerianne's expression had to carry the emotional core of the piece while everything around her erupted into pattern and gold. That contrast, of a quiet, direct gaze surrounded by decorative chaos, is really the whole point of the composition.

One Queen Down, Five to Go

This piece sets the visual grammar for the rest of the series: the arched frame, the crown-as-halo, the jewel-toned palette shifting to gold and rose. Each of the remaining five queens will get her own color story and ornamental motifs suited to her personality, but they'll all speak the same Nouveau dialect this one does.

Two hundred hours in, one queen down. Five to go — and now I know what the bar is.