Herculaneum

When Vesuvius erupted in AD79, refugees from Herculaneum took refuge in boathouses build into the city wall, awaiting rescue from the sea.  They waited in vain.  Their bodies were buried, huddled together, beneath 30 metres of fallen ash to be discovered nearly two thousand years later.  One cannot but be moved on seeing these many skeletons in arch after arch in the disinterred ruins: bearing witness to their unfolding terror, hope and despair.

I found myself unable to draw here, standing jostling to look with other tourists.  However long ago, these were people deserving of respect and reflection.

I have in mind a piece of art distorting scale and perspective to draw together those who died awaiting rescue, the ruins, the weight of ash and the modern town perched above.  Behind it all sits the volcano.  To this end, here are the first very small fast sketches, drawn from my photographs taken in October.

 

three small sketches

Two of these sketches were done in the café at the swimming pool while my kids had lessons.  They were drawn in my smallest pocket sized notebook in conte crayon and grey brushpen.  I realised I had covered the table with pigmented dust and mopped it up with spilt tea.

They were inspired by photographs I had taken in Pompeii and archival photographs of the last eruption of Vesuvius in 1943.

Some weeks before we went on holiday to see Pompeii, I chanced to see an man in his 90s and it came out in conversation that the reason his skin was so prone to cancer in old age was it had been chronically exposed to sun working outdoors in Italy as a Royal Engineer.  What was that like, I asked.  It was great he said, we blew things up.  He found himself on the beach near Naples when Vesuvius erupted, the ground shaking beneath his feet and ash dropping on them.  What did you do, I asked.  We just stayed there, he said, the army didn’t really know what to do.  This is corroborated in the archival accounts on line.  The Allies were gradually winning the war and pushing up through Italy but were a bit nonplussed by a volcano erupting.

When I was a teenager, my mother’s partner, then the age I am now, had spent his youth driving a tank through Italy in that same campaign.  He had clearly fallen in love with Italy, its women and wine. He went on to learn the language and imported Italian wine and lingerie for a living.  From him I learned to love crisp dry Prosecco and that not all right wing anarchic Tories are bad.

 

 

 

Faun

The dancing faun bronze sits centre gallery in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.  It was found in a grand house built in the second century BCE , damaged in the Earthquake of AD62 and buried in ash in the eruption AD69 which obliterated Pompeii.  This sketch was an essay in the use of the graphite stick to build tones and leave highlight.

My daughter had retired fatigued to a bench some distance away and so drew the same subject largely from memory and imagination, making use of the black card I had put in her sketchbook to stiffen it for drawing.  I think also she found close proximity to its male nakedness a little challenging as a subject for drawing.  

She was unaware that I had already already steered her past the adjacent “secret room” containing priapic amulets and statuettes from Pompeii so shocking that, at various times since the eighteenth century, they have been held in a bricked up repository, and at others, shown only to persons of mature age and respectable morals, which apparently means old men.  I wish I had sketched in the secret room myself, but I too found standing there drawing those comic grotesque artefacts a little challenging. 

Structures without humanity

This was the large theatre in Pompeii caught in strong afternoon sunlight at the end of October.  This was roughed out in conte crayon and then the pigment was shifted about with a Faber Castell cool grey brush pen

 

This view of the amphitheatre was made from one of the tunnels through which I guess, the fighters entered.  It was drawn with the side of a graphite stick and then worked over in crayon and brush pen to add colour and deeper tones.  In the labyrinth which encircled it beneath the stands, there was an exhibition and video display of the young Pink Floyd playing this venue, not for a live audience but for the backdrop and acoustics.

    

My daughter’s drawings of the large theatre populated them with larger than life people, whereas I eliminated the people who were really there, wanting only to show the structure without the clutter of humanity.

Igor Mitoraj in Pompeii

These are my sketches of the bronze sculptures, placed in the setting of Pompeii’s ruins with the looming presence of Vesuvius behind.  These were done using fountain pen, water, conte crayon and Faber Castell grey brush pens.

I was struck that most of these mock-mythical figures are male.  Though cracked and fractured through pseudo-millennia, they are endowed with mouths and genitals.  The female figures are sparse, without heads and with genitalia obscured, typically by small grotesque masks.

Pompeii forum, with the fallen Icarus (fore), with Tyndareus, father of Helen of Sparta (back)

 

Daedalus, father of Icarus

 

Ikarus and Ikaria: male and female Icarus’

 

Pompeii basilica: centaur

 

Pompeii basilica: Male and female Icarus’

 

Pompeii basilica: first sketches of two Icarus’

 

Intersection of main roads in Pompeii: winged Eros with hand.

 

Second century bath complex: Sulla riva grande screpolata

 

Columned quadrangle by the theatre: Cracked Theseus

 

Seeing, imagining, drawing

 

In the columned quadrangle behind Pompeii’s small theatre had been placed three bronze sculptures by the late Polish artist, Igor Mitoraj.  He drew on classical sources for his bold structures, typically fractured and fragmented to suggest the ephemeral nature of all we build.  Here, Teseo screpolato (Cracked Theseus) is shown against the remains of walls hit not only by Vesuvius but much later by Allied bombing.

I have scraped conte crayon over heavily textured stiff paper then used Faber and Castell cool grey brush pens to deepen the tones on the metal surface and brickwork.

My daughter worked on smoother cartridge paper and gained greater depth of colour from the conte crayons.  I love the interlocking shapes which build the tones of the bronze face.

 

 

Seeing, imagining, drawing

Herculaneum was hit by waves of superheated gas and dust moving faster than an express train before being buried in 15-30 metres of ash.  It was forgotten.  Much later a new town was renamed Ercolano, in honour of the ruins discovered beneath its foundations.

We sat in front of the baths, looking across the columns which once lined the ancient exercise yard.  I had wanted to show the current multi-story buildings, decked out with drying washing, perching small and uncertain above the steep cliff of the excavations and the walls of the dwellings the volcano destroyed.  I misjudged the scale and found no space for the modern buildings above the grey border wall.

My daughter has written cryptically about her sketch, done at the same time: “I was thinking at the time that I will do it a little different from my other drawings”.

 

 

Seeing, imagining, drawing

My nine year old daughter and I sat together in the evening sunshine, looking down Via della Scuole to Pompeii’s forum, set against the overwhelming backdrop of Vesuvius’ crater.  We shared the same view and the same materials, coloured ink in fountain pens, conte crayons and cool grey Faber Castell brush pens.  These last are a new addition to my field kit: they build on the crayon pigment scattered across the textured paper, solidifying it as blocks of solid tone.

How differently we perceived the scene and reconstructed this on the paper, integrating the different elements, light, volcano, walls, pavements and road.  The differences stem in part from learned techniques and in part learned norms; the use of perspective falling into both categories.  Faced with representing four dimensions on a rectangular page, one of us drew the kerbs of the paved highway as converging lines, the other switched their direction to retain their essential parallel geometry.