More images of the grape harvest

Three contrasting images of the grape harvest.

Southern Europe Northern Europe and one from a Chinese text discussing grapes as medicine.

Early Grapes

There is a long tradition in Western and European art of rendering vines and grapes in a variety of media, mosaic, fresco, oils, and carving or moulding. Here is one of the earliest examples of fresco.

Its Roman and we don't know if it was an original work or a copy as a fresco of a wax encaustic work but consider this the pattern of cracking suggests the wet plaster and then the paint was applied in one session ... yes one session and yet the degree of detail ... shadows highlights stems handles ... a still life masterpiece.

Wine Working Woman

For our next image in the grapes and wine series lets jump forwards to the Renaissance.

Francesco del Cossa painted this about 1460 and most probably was part of a series of panels originally in council chamber in Ferrara. It has also been attributed to Cosimo Tura, and is now in a Berlin Museum.

Its been called Polyhymnia or Allegory of Autumn but importantly its an excellent example of a young woman worker depicted with grace and strength pausing from her work tending vines.

Grape Pressing - Roman

While researching Maenads and Satyrs I keep finding images of Satyrs and Silenoi pressing grapes but not Humans in Greek Classical but no human workers until I added Roman as a search parameter.

Even then I got several images of cupids pressing grapes but finally I found this image.

Its part of a larger mosaic showing activities linked to various months of the year.

The ancients seemed to have used much shallower vats then modern winegrowers. 

I'll be sharing more images of this activity over the next few blogs showing how depictions of workers changed over the centuries.

Wine Pressing from the Tomb of Nakht

#wine #winemaking #winepress #egyptianpainting #tombofnakht

One of the oldest known paintings if not the oldest I've found so far of grape growing and harvesting.

also of interest as it shows ethnic diversity in ancient egypt with two blonde greeks or northerners or two older egyptians with  sun or aged bleached hair ? and the egyptians having coloring and hairstyles that are NOT all identical!

As I'm doing Dionysus over on my metousia blog I thought I might take a look at images of grapes and wine growing and making in other cultures.

Next time some roman imagery.

Digital Ink Inkscape and Inktober

Been thinking about #Inktober

I usually don't have time to do a daily drawing but for those of you who prefer digital ink here's a couple of  rough sketches / ideas for using #inkscape

After you select the pen tool set it to dip pen this was done by finger on a touch pad kinda rough but you get the idea ?

Add one of the ink texture filters for a wet paper effect ?

INK whether its digital felt tip or pen enjoy playing with it !

AWESOME

This is a smaller lower resolution version of my newest #redbubble design

Copyright Julie Vaux 2017 

To see this and other designs visit

http://www.redbubble.com/people/scholara

where you can buy this on stickers and clothing and gift items!

Ornate Capitals Experiment

I have been experimenting with merging and editing two different font variants of a basic letter form to create a new ornate capital.

Needs more tweaking with nodes and paths but could be a useful shortcut for developing fonts ?

Mountain Shapes

Please visit and view my new Mountain Shapes series on #redbubble


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