Sculpture of Greek boxer with traces of red paint. Roman copy of Greek original. From the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities' collections.

One of my favourite spots in Stockholm is The Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities. Now and then I venture there with my sketchbook and Bagdad Café is great a great place for a break. I love how the museum is in a former bank built in 1905, with a neo-classical interior, and the ancient Egyptian mummies are displayed in the old bank vault! I’ve just been to the opening of the exhibition White Lies, and this time I brought my iPad to take notes, scribbles and make sketches with my fingers, during the three lectures.

White Lies, Turning the Western Ideal of Beauty on its Head
“The ancient statues of white marble were long regarded as bearers of Western cultural identity and markers of superiority. In actual fact, all ancient sculptures were painted – something that was kept a secret from the Italian Renaissance until the present. However, the most astonishing fact is not that ancient sculptures were once painted, but that leading art critics and museum curators managed to conceal this knowledge from the ordinary museum visitor.”

Head of Caligula. Left: Head of Caligula, color reconstruction. Right: Original (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)

The exhibition White Lies displays how vibrantly colourful the ancient sculptures actually were. Not at all pristine white monochrome, but richly polychrome. The idea of white marble dates back to the early 16th century, when the Renaissance began excavating statues that had been buried in the earth for centuries. Color traces still visible to the naked eye, deep in the folds of draped clothing, went unnoticed. Following what they believed to be the Greek and Roman example, Italian sculptors — notably Michelangelo — conceived their creations as uncolored.

But there were clues elsewhere, in literature. From Helen of Troy, Euripides’ play that bears her name Helen:
My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.

I feel thoughtful after seeing White Lies. Thinking about what our other misconceptions of history are. About what we consider beautiful, or prestigious, or fine art and how reluctant we can be to change our view of the world. How our time may be misunderstood in the future. I’m thinking about our selves too. Our mindsets. Both in our small, personal world and the world we live in. How important I think it is to be willing to continuously take stock of one’s life and outlook. To constantly redefine, to try to understand oneself and others better and to put that into action. Redefinition.

Some of my sketches and notes from White Lies. Roman sculpture. Professor Vinzenz Brinkmann.

One of the dragons from The Nine Dragons handscroll (九龙图／九龍圖), painted by the Song-Dynasty Chinese artist Chen Rong (陈容／陳容) in 1244 CE.

After trying, without success, to photograph birds this Saturday, I’ve still been thinking about them. Birds. And trees. Light and dark. So today I’ve been reading about mythical firebirds with brightly coloured plumage. The Phoenix lives a long life, and then is consumed by flames of its own making, only to rise again from the ashes. This lonely bird (there is only one Phoenix) is a universal symbol of the sun, mystical rebirth, resurrection and immortality and represents a cyclical process of life from death.

I discovered that the firebird is found in many cultures, the earliest found in the Egyptian Bennu (meaning “to rise brilliantly,” or “to shine”), the soul of the sun god Ra. The Persian sacred bird is called Huma or “the bird of paradise” or “bird of fortune” and looks similar to a heron. Compassionate Huma is said to have both the male and female natures in one body, each nature having one wing and one leg.

Death of a Phoenix, burning in the flames.

The Greeks and later the Romans called their firebird Phoenix, φοίνιξ, meaning the color purple-red or crimson and pictured the bird more like a peacock or an eagle. According to Greek legend, the Phoenix lived in Arabia close to a cool well. Every morning at dawn, it bathes in the water of the well and sings such a delightful and sweet song that Apollo (the god of light and the sun), would stop his chariot (the sun) to listen to the enchanting song.

Fenghuang is the Chinese correspondence to the phoenix, a chimera composited of many birds including the head of a golden pheasant, the body of a mandarin duck, the tail of a peacock, the legs of a crane, the mouth of a parrot, and the wings of a swallow. Gentle and immortal Fenghuang brings good fortunes and the expression “Dragon and Phoenix” signifies wedded bliss. And then I started to read about Chinese dragons, with their long, serpentine bodies, a supernatural or spiritual symbol of heavenly power… And all this started with flocks of birds that refused to let themselves be photographed.

Detail of the painting The Nine Dragons, by Chen Rong (active c. 1235–1260), painted in 1244 during the Southern Song Dynasty. The painting was done with ink on paper. It is now located in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Dreamboard. Full Harvest Moon. October 2009.

A Dreamboard for the Full Harvest Moon. Layers of transformation, expanding creative expressions, painting, photography, writing, type… The past, the present. And finding a focus for the future.

I was standing in the museum of a castle ruin, reading fascinating (no I’m not being sarcastic) and informative text on those typical museum boards, when suddenly the graffiti on the wall behind the board caught my attention. Or rather came forward to me, like a wave of text, like light, layers and layers of graffiti carved onto the stone wall. And I started to photograph the graffiti, going from room to room, floor to floor, captivated by it, following its light, and forgetting everything else… The earliest date I found was 1609, and the most recent was 2009. It was like a living memorial to all those people. I imagined each person writing their name on the wall, carving glorious moments of stolen kisses, or writing a “here I am, I exist” in the middle of an everyday experience… I wondered if people ever recalled, later on, the moment when they crafted that graffiti…

When I returned from my journey to Öland, my best friend wanted to see my photos from my trip, but I mostly have loads of photos of this graffiti from the castle… One of the images, the one below, was the starting point for this collage, and was meant to be the focal point, and yet it didn’t make it in! Somehow it just got to be too much.

Here is a desktop wallpaper and an October desktop calendar version of my Harvest Moon dreamscape.

Centuries of layered graffiti on the wall of a castle ruin.

October. Russet, plum, dark brown, rust, gold, purple and green. Mushrooms. Candied apples. Figs. Pumpkins. Roasted chestnuts. Halloween. And as I walk down the road, a scattering of acorns, pine cones and oak leaves.

I’ve been working on this image, inspired by my trip to Öland and the graffiti in a medieval castle. Creating a dreamscape in a whole different format when I realised it would work as a desktop wallpaper too, so I adapted the montage with its layers of writing and watercolours to desktop sizes. This download contains fullscreen, widescreen and iPhone versions. Montage wallpaper works very well with the collection of Purple Luminous Folder Icons, the Orange and Pink Folder Icons and Vintage Folder Icons: Purple Grapes.

< — Save this wallpaper to your computer.