Margo Vilon… in Love with the Egyptian Environment
On February 19, 1907, Margo Vilon was born in Cairo to a Swede father and an Austrian mother. During her 80-year-stay in Egypt, she was completely dazzled by the Egyptian environment and with her brush that fell in love with the inspiring landscape, she excelled in drawing Egypt's deserts and villages that pulse with beauty and vitality. Being under the influence of the Egyptian charming scenery, Margo Vilon assimilated the Egyptian culture, together with the Austrian and Swiss cultures, and set it incumbent upon herself to express with her colours and depict with her brush her infatuation with this great culture.
Since her childhood, her parents were the first to discover her God-given talent in drawing that simply started as childish drawings on walls until it matured into a real talent that has to be nurtured. Thus, at the age of 12 Margo Vilon was sent to Paris to study fine arts, ad to become sated with the emanating artistic atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s. This allowed her to communicate with the artistic environment of that period, and she managed to promote her own artistic skills and return to Egypt with a distinguished artistic technique. However, soon after she started wondering in Egypt's lanes, mosques, villages and oases, she got dazzled by the accurate lines and the spontaneous spirit of everything around her. Consequently, she found herself no longer motivated to adopt what she learnt, but rather eager to depict what she saw.
She carried her brush, and in vivid colours, she portrayed the Egyptian landscape that pulses with simplicity and spontaneity. She devoted most of her works to recording movements of simple Egyptian peasants, rural women and pot carriers, as well as reflecting the daily life on the Nile banks.
Vilon derived most of her themes from the inspiring streets of Egypt; she drew the streets as they are: simple and full of life.
In all her works, Margo Vilon was not only depicting the charming scenes as they are, but rather as they should always be; thus, all her paintings were characterized by simplicity, vividness and spontaneity.
All along her life, Margo Vilon had her own rituals and private tools that enabled her to delve into the simple Egyptian life, with its various scenes, and record with her brush the genuine spirit of the Egyptian environment.
Margo Vilon was not only painting a beautiful scenes, but she was pouring life into her paintings, to turn them into a vivid manifestation of beauty around her.
Once your eyes set on any of her paintings, you fee yourself part of the scenes, standing beside fishermen and farmers, smelling the breeze of the Nile and meditating on the cracked caves. In addition, she was so keen on depicting movements of objects around her as a sickle used in harvesting bananas or a horse dancing in a calibration. The passionate Margo Vilon was also fascinated by portraying the facial lines and Egyptian features of Nubians, regarded as part and parcel of the Egyptian society.
Margo Vilon's remarkable accuracy came as the outcome of her 80-year-long wandering in Egypt, moving among its villages and hamlets and coming close to the simple villages. Thus, her paintings came full of vividness, motion and life. From every spot in Egypt, Margo Vilon was keen on possessing a souvenir that reminds her of unforgettable memories in her life. In Ma'adi, at the garden surrounding her studio, in her own villa, she kept a splendid collection of beautiful rocks and portions of fossilized tree-stems and shells she gathered during her safari in the Egyptian deeserts. With the aim of preserving this great heritage, along with her paintings, she offerd her masterpieces as a gift to the American University in Cairo so as to make sure that her sublime artistic message reaches everyone interested in that field, whether through the annual exhibitions held in the AUC in honor of this great artist or the series of books published to depict her life, wanderings and vivid embodiment of the Egyptian environment.
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