Pseudo Travel Journal Greece: Entry 4

click image to enlarge

 A bit of a longer post today trying to catch up on the past few days work.  The architecture is so challenging for me. I've been using pencil guidelines but I think I'm going to abandon that and go straight to pen. Partly in the interest of time, which I don't seem to have a lot of right now, as I am involved in a few projects, and partly because I'd like to train my eye and hand to really draw what I see. Find the lines, angles and symmetry in a natural way so that the sketch has a reasonable sense of accuracy.

click image to enlarge

 Finding a lot of beautiful and interesting spots in the video class that catch my interest and imagination. I loved the light and long shadows of the columns in this scene.

click image to enlarge

 The Temple of the Winds was fascinating, a true marvel of ingenuity form the ancient world. I believe that the ancients had quite a bit of advanced knowledge and understanding, more than we seem to want to give them credit for, It is not just the modern scientific era that has technology!

click image to enlarge

I've been particularly on the look out during the class for temples to Goddesses. The one above is to Themis the Goddess of Justice.

click image to enlarge

This is a lovely temple out in the country to the Goddess Artemis.

click image to enlarge

Here is the actual crack in the earth in a cleft of a hillside that leads to the underworld. It is the place the ancient Greeks believed Hades emerged from to snatch Persephone away, leaving her mother Demeter, Goddess of Grain grieving and angry, thus withdrawing her sustaining power from the earth and causing crops to die off and winter to come. I had no idea that there was an actual place you could go and see!  Every September initiation rituals were performed that brought people into the cult of Demeter, and what ever they saw and heard has been kept secret for all time. It was however, a life changing experience according to the records we have, with the basic theme being that Demeter would give her initiates the power to have life even after physical death.