Have been looking at archaic space again. It is flattened, figures and objects in silhouette or profile view, "background" of indeterminant depth, areas of flat color in a limited palette–often red, yellow, black, & white, action arranged on a baseline. What else? Call it archaic not only because it seems to be historically old, but also because the root of archaic is arkhe, Greek meaning beginning, and this is how we start depicting space, as children. These are gouache sketches from my sketchbook of wolf & bear. Notice the Latin names spelled in phonetic Greek–lupus & ursa–a convention of Greek vases that I love.
More sketches from A Book of Rings by Anne van Cutsem, found at Norlin library (CU Boulder). Pages and pages of antique rings from Asia, Africa, & America–wow!
