Things are slowing down a little here in anticipation of the term ending. Most of the other CYA kids are finishing finals and leaving, but our finals are just starting! Yay!
We did get some trips in, one to the Pnyx and one to the Numismatic (Coin) Museum. I can’t say I loved the coin museum, but I found some things to pass the time.
Who are these guys? Horse with man head??? Very strange. Why are there several of him.
The Pnyx was interesting, I especially appreciated the variety of ancient sources that Professor Harris included in the handout. One of my favourite things in Classics is when people use literary analysis to learn things about the ancient world; it’s so cool when something an author mentions in passing can be used to complete our picture of the past. I also decided I need to watch a showing of Assemblywomen by Aristophanes. The premise is that women dress up as men and attend the council meeting, and vote to give women all the power. Sounds like my kind of thing, right?
We also had an amazing pottery workshop as well at ATTIC BLACK, where we did red and black-figure pottery. I chose to do the same picture on both sides of the tile, one in black-figure and one in red-figure.
What’s red now will be black, and the grey will be red once it’s fired. For the black figure, you paint the whole silhouette of the figure and scratch away the details. The red-figure is the opposite, you paint around the outline and do the details normally. I definitely preferred doing the black-figure, it was much easier to get thin lines by scratching away the slip, but this might have been an issue with the tool I was using. If I was a 5th Century painter I would want a very thin brush, especially since you have to do 3 coats to get the slip opaque.
More will be written next week, after I finish some of these finals.