LEWIS BRYDEN

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Olympia
16" x 20"
Bougainvillea
20" x 16"

Acropolis
20" x 16"


Ruins and the Sea: Greece 2014

For most of the past thirty years I have been a landscape painter. Recently, however, I started carving marble. This turns out to fit nicely with my lifelong interest in ancient Greece.

It was with alacrity, then, that I seized on a friend's suggestion that I accompany him on a tour of the important Greek historical sites. My friend is an archeologist, and he was leading a group of schoolchildren. That wouldn't be so bad, I figured, since the group would thus be moving slowly enough for me to make notes and do paintings of what I was seeing.

The itinerary took us to Crete's famous Palace of Knossos, the port city of Heraklion, then to Piraeus, Corinth, Epidaurus, and Nauplion. After a stay in the first capital of modern Greece, we went to Nemea, Mycenae, Olympia and then, leaving the Peloponnesus, on to Delphi, and then the islands of Mykonos and Delos, with a final few days in Athens. I had all my painting equipment with me in a hard-sided suitcase, so at every stop I would set up outdoors in the daylight and begin an oil sketch. As has happened before, the light and air that is peculiar to each place gave my paintings a new and unified look. I painted the ruins, the old streets, the harbors, the houses, all of them in the special light of Greece, of which we have heard so much from history and literature.

The top left picture is of Olympia, which had the most extensive and best preserved ruins. I remember having to stand in the blazing hot sun to do this scene.

The top center picture is of a street scene in Nauplion. Again, I am reminded of the difficulties of painting outdoors. As I stood in the middle of the street, I had to keep moving my easel to let traffic get by. My main goal was to get the color of the bougainvillea vine climbing up a building.

The top right picture is of the Acropolis. I wanted to capture the striking tranquility of the ancient Greek and Roman structures as the sun was going down and shadows were moving rapidly.

delphi
20" x 16"

Heraklion
16" x 20"

Mykonos
16" x 20"


Nemea
16" x 20"


Nauplion
16" x 20"

 

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