Culver City Art Group presents free art demo at Graphaids

The Culver City Art Group (CCAG) is once again holding our annual membership drive at Graphaids, 3030 S. La Cienega Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232 (just south of Washington Blvd.) Saturday, September, 15 from 11:00am until 2:00pm.

You can download a flyer here in PDF or JPG format.

This year our art demo artist is traditional naturalist painter Stephen D. West.

As I would like to paint some more ceramic tiles in my Wetlands series I am looking forward to picking up some useful tips.

All members of the public are invited to drop by to watch this free art demo with no obligation to become a member.

Chat with our members, enjoy some cookies and sodas.

If you should decide to become a member, you get a 40% discount on art supplies at Graphaids this day only. Normally the discount for CCAG members is 30%.

For more info about the Culver City Art Group, please check out our website at www.culvercityartgroup.com. Please note, we recently changed the web address, so if you already have us in your favorites under a different address, please bookmark this new URL so you can find us next time.

The Culver City Art Group is an organization of approximately 35 local amateur and professional artists meeting at different venues in the Culver City and Los Angeles area. We embrace all visual arts from traditional to digital, two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
For our members we have activities and special events such as painting/sketching afternoons, museum and gallery visits, group exhibits and artist demos.
Our excursions have included exploring Descanso Gardens and the Huntington Library, painting trips to Laguna Beach and Topanga Park, walking tours of the art galleries in Culver City and West Hollywood, and visits to museums such as Norton Simon and LACMA.
Although you must be a member to participate in our activities, anyone interested is invited to join us at our general meetings.

A visit to the Getty centered on flowers

Copyright J. Paul Getty Museum

Ten members of the Culver City Art Group visited the Getty Center this past Saturday in order to view Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line, the first exhibit solely dedicated to the drawings of Gustav Klimt who lived from 1862–1918.

I love Klimt’s magical masterpieces such as The Kiss, which I had the privilege of seeing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before it was kidnapped by a private collector.

Looking at the drawings and sketches that preceded his paintings made me realize how much hard work went into the final product. It’s easy to think of an artist just sitting down and painting and… voila… there is the finished piece. But there is a lot of groundwork that goes on beforehand.

There is a great video about why drawing was so important to Klimt. Click here to view it.

We all enjoyed a docent tour of the exhibit then walked through again on our own.

But it was such a gorgeous day that although there were other exhibits I would have liked to see, I could not stay inside the galleries.  

So I trotted on down to the central garden. I walked, sat, people watched and took photos.

As a regular visitor to the Getty Center I have a million photos of the place. So on this visit I decided to get some shots of flowers in the garden.

(Photos copyright roslyn m wilkins)

Mosaics at Colchester, the oldest city in Britain

Colchester is the oldest city in Britain and for a time was the capital of Roman Britain. As you may know, the Romans conquered Britain in AD 43. Even before the Romans, it was a major Celtic center. After the Boudica rebellion in AD 61 and the destruction of the town, the capital moved to London.

In May I visited there because of the Roman mosaics on display, but the Colchester Castle Museum is housed in the largest keep built by the Normans in Europe, measuring 46 x 33.5m (151 x 110ft). Construction of the castle began in 1076. In case you’re keeping count, that’s 800 years older than the oldest existing building in Los Angeles!

As you can see from the photos, the weather was beautiful that day. It rained on and off while I was there but I guess I was lucky as the month before and the month after were the wettest on record.

The mosaic above was discovered in 1922 by Mr. Frost when he was digging in his kitchen garden. The floor was 4.6m (15 ft) and was laid in a reception room of a luxurious house around 120AD. Similar designs have been found around Colchester suggesting there was a mosaic workshop in the town.

A pretty good law in my opinion.

The design of this mosaic is made up of box shapes, decorated with lozenge swastikas, guilloche knots and L-shaped guilloche border panels. The central square holds a large, stylized flower with heart-shaped petals and leafy tendrils. Late 2nd Century AD.

I liked the vignettes set up to show life at different periods in Colchester. This was very early England.

Part of the corner of a large panel. Excavated in 1865.

Light shineth through an open window. You can see how thick the walls are.

More views of the museum.

You'll need to click on the text photo to in order to read it.

A fine small mosaic and some artifacts.

A room in a Roman house showing the structure of the wall, an original mural and a reconstruction. Part of a mosaic in the corner. The Romans loved to decorate.

Click on this drawing so you can see the text explaining the different parts of the room structure.

Mosaicist's workshop like one probably located in the local area. Small stone cubes (tesserae) are chipped into shape and sorted by color. Small panels (emblema) with patterns are created before being sent to the site.

Artist's reconstruction of a large, luxurious Roman house excavated in Colchester. Built 2nd C AD and demolished about 300AD. Nothing changes! Excavations revealed a central courtyard with a surrounding wooden drain to carry away rainwater. A kitchen with at least 11 ovens and an internal water source. A semi-sunken stone cellar. A large living room with mosaic floor. A hypocaust (underfloor heating). And a basement with a mosaic that was possibly an underground shrine.

Yet another view!

Model of the castle under a scratched up glass case.

A composite photo showing the fireplace, mantle and roof of a house in Medieval England.
My visit to Colchester castle ended in a torrential downpour as we headed to the carpark. I told my friend to run ahead as my knee was having a conniption that day. By the time I arrived at the carpark the rain was coming down so hard I could not find his car. So I wandered around literally soaked down to my underwear.
My friend had made it back to the car but because of the rain he couldn't see me either! After a few minutes the rain let up enough for him to pop his head out of the door and then I saw him and the car. Oh well, what would a trip to England be without buckets of rain?
And I had enjoyed myself taking the time machine back to Roman England.

(Photos copyright roslyn m wilkins)

A dream becomes reality - visiting the mosaics at Fishbourne Roman Palace in England - Part Two

My purpose in visiting Fishbourne Roman Palace was, of course, to see the mosaics. It is one thing to view mosaics in a museum hanging vertically on a wall, completely out of context (like at the British Museum, for example). But seeing the mosaics in situ, the way they were originally laid out, is a whole other experience.

Mosaic with 3D effect.
At right is where a wall was constructed to divide the room into two.

Obviously, unless somebody perfects time travel (and I wish that somebody would hurry up) we will never be able to view these ancient mosaics the way they were intended to be seen, with all the trappings.

Solomon's Knot surrounded by dolphins and wine vases from early 3rd C.

For starters, except for the foundations, all the walls are missing at Fishbourne (as they are at most sites where ancient mosaics are found) which means we don’t see the frescoes that would have surrounded each room. Not to mention the furniture, sculptures and textiles. And the decorated columns.

In the case of Fishbourne, the building disappeared piece by piece and mysteriously showed up as parts of newer construction in the town. Conservation was not a big issue in previous eras, but reuse of materials certainly was. Also, there was a disastrous fire sometime between 270 to 280. And over the centuries, the rooms in the building changed their usage until the whole thing was forgotten and buried under several feet of dirt and grass.

Excavation of the Palace in the 1960s.
It was discovered when a water-main trench was being dug.

What visitors can see today is the north wing which is sheltered by a covered building. (The west wing contains five mosaics which were reburied for their protection.) There is a walkway running the length of the building between the mosaic areas. This is the closest we can get to viewing the mosaics without actually walking on them which, of course, the inhabitants of the Palace would have done.

Mosaic conforming to contours as floor warped beneath it.
It cannot be straightened out as the mosaic pieces have stretched.

In a couple of places it was discovered that a newer mosaic had been installed over an older one, rather than removing it before laying the later one over it. In other areas, the mosaics were laid over post holes from the original wood building so they have sunk into the floor. About a thousand years ago, give or take a few, farmers plowing the land unearthed some of the mosaics and building foundations. But it meant nothing to them, and they went on about their business.
Despite the damage from disasters, ploughshares (or plowshares depending on your version of the English language) and robbers, the mosaics have remained in good enough shape to give us a reasonable idea of what they looked like when they were enjoyed by visitors to the Palace.

The Palace is well signed both indoors and out. So with the help of the illustrated guidebook I mentioned in Part One, and reading the informational plaques, the visitor is treated to a pretty thorough understanding of the life and times of the mosaics and the building.

Looking at the covered North Wing from the gardens.
The southern half of the gardens and the rest of the palace remain buried
under the town of Fishbourne.

Concrete demarkations in grass show where walls
would have been in East Wing of the Palace.

The gardens have been reconstructed according to what is known about Roman horticulture, completing the picture of what this magnificent building must have been like almost two thousand years ago.

Now I am back in LA, I wish I could just jump on the train and spend another day at Fishbourne. 

Click here to read Part One of this blog post. Later on, when I have more time, I'll be posting a photo album of Fishbourne.

(All photos copyright roslyn m wilkins) 

A dream becomes reality - visiting the mosaics at Fishbourne Roman Palace in England - Part One

From the train window on the way to Fishbourne. Possibly Arundel Castle?

The train pulled into the station. Fishbourne, West Sussex, England. It was unreal. No, it was real. I was finally going to see FishbourneRoman Palace after years of imagining what it would be like. Weather-wise it could not have been a better day. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. Not too hot and not too cold. Perfect.

Was this the weather the Romans had encountered when they first arrived here in AD 43, or was it cold and rainy and they wished they had stayed home?

From the train window on the way to Fishbourne. Fields of rapeseed.

I was born in England but have lived all my adult life in Los Angeles. The first Spanish settlers arrived in LA in 1769. That is my history now. AD 43 is hard to grasp, yet I have a definite attachment to that era—in fact, anything to do with the Roman Empire. If only the Roman army had gotten as far as southern California—oh well, no point in dreaming…

I have no idea what I was expecting. Should Fishbourne Roman Palace be some towering structure on a 1500-foot hill overlooking all of Sussex? That would not have surprised me, but it was not the case.

Walking down the steps from the train station I found myself in a residential area. There was a small sign pointing down the street.
I passed typical English brick houses, then a schoolyard with uniformed children playing. More houses. Was I going in the wrong direction? Then another sign. Visitors to the school should park in the Roman Palace parking lot. Okay. I was on the right road.

I found the parking lot. Oh joy. There were some buildings. But they didn’t look like a palace.
I entered the glass doors. On my right was the gift shop (always my favorite section of any place I visit) and on the left was the museum with artifacts and historical information. In front of me were the mosaic floors. I immediately knew I was in heaven.

This was the moment I had been dreaming of for… how many years… I really don’t know… a long, long time.

I took my first class in the archaeology certificate program at UCLA in 2004. I was immediately hooked. The following year I was asked to identify my area of primary interest. In order to answer the question I thought about a school excursion when I was very young to a site where mosaics were being excavated. I have no idea where that could have been. Certainly not Fishbourne, as that was not open to the public until 1968.

Without really thinking, my answer was Roman mosaics. I don’t even know where that came from as I had not thought about that school expedition for decades. But it seemed right. Somehow, out of the deepest corner of my memory this had surfaced. And from that moment on Roman mosaics became my obsession and interest.

On trips to Italy and Greece since then I had seen ancient mosaics in situ and they were wonderful. But to see them in my home country, real Roman mosaics, was beyond words. So I won’t attempt to explain the feeling here.

Fishbourne is the largest and earliest Roman Villa in England. After the initial conquest there were wooden buildings in the area. To make a longer story shorter, the Palace was built over those foundations between AD 75 and 80, probably for the British King of that area, Togidubnus, who was loyal to Rome.

Fishbourne Roman Villa. Walkway overlooking mosaics on both sides.

Unfortunately for us, the town of Fishbourne—complete with modern houses, shops, and the A259 highway—is built over half of the Villa. From time to time artifacts are dug up from the homeowners’ gardens so the extent of the Palace is known.

Fishbourne Roman Palace. Another shot of the walkway.

But fortunately for us, the part that is visible contains the most amazing mosaic floors. Although mosaic floors are associated with Roman houses, only the richest people could afford them, and then only in a few rooms. So to see this many mosaic floors all in one place is quite unusual.

Before looking at the mosaics, I purchased the booklet Fishbourne Roman Palace, An Illustrated Family Guide by David Rudkin. This really enhanced my visit as it is written from the point of view of Togidubnus, as if he was giving visitors from the future a tour of his home.

I will end part one here. To read Part Two of this blog post, click here.

(Photos copyright roslyn m wilkins)

My new blog

I have started a new blog at hot out of the kiln. I will be posting images of my ceramic art work as it comes out of the kiln.

I will maintain this blog for general news and observations about art, tiles and ceramics.

Calm and quiet equals creativity

I always love to read about creative people... especially women... who are juggling many facets of their lives but still find time for art.

Delphine Frank is a glass mosaicist and calligrapher (along with her "real" job). You can read her story here.

I especially like that she says her ideas come to her when she is calm and quiet. When she forces herself to be creative, nothing happens.

I have found that to be true. Sometimes I like to take a nap in the afternoon or sit out on my deck for twenty minutes and watch the sky. Or walk up to the top of the park at the end of my street. It is during those times that my brain is at its most creative.