And then of course there are also the wine, food, Museums, Roman villae…

And so I dream of my next pieces : I have been drawing mosaic models. I am building a sort of library of geometric patterns, and of figuratives used by Roman and Greek  mosaicists and painters.

Villa Romana del Casale, 4th century, Sicily

I am convinced that some of our ancestor mosaicists used some sort of catalogs,  books or scrolls of drawing and sketches, and I am thinking of recreating something like this, digitally for now, and possibly on paper later.  Nobody has ever found any of these hypothetical catalogs, but I have documented several instances where similar designs were used in very different times and places.

I also believe mosaicists shared these books with painters, and possibly that in some cases the painter and mosaicist in charge of decorating a new villa were the same person.

I have been working on repetitive geometric patterns for about 18 month now, and have used these to create scarves or other type of garments.

Chedworth, 2nd century, Britain

Some archaeologists worked on this already, on a strictly documentary way. My goal is to create documents that can actually be used to design AND make mosaics, or other things, fabrics, clothing, etc…

2nd century floor of a Praetorian commander home in Rome

The Aldoborough She wolf is probably the goofiest Roman mosaic ever. I smile every time I see her !

I can imagine the master mosaicist telling his helper :

“Hey Caius, I need to go to the Pub talk to the architect, can you complete the wolf for me ? “

“Sure master , no problem, you know you can trust me!”

And a few animals from mosaics depicting Orpheus taming them with his music.