Brit­ish Museum

Last week I paid a trip to the Brit­ish Museum. I had a review of work day at uni for my research project (I’m doing a research/​practice based MA in Sequen­tial Design) and I felt like I should do some­thing substan­tial­ish on the visu­al research side.

My project’s making anim­ated films based on selec­ted stor­ies from Ovid’s Meta­morph­oses, and I’d had the idea of doing some of the films based on related peri­ods of greek art, avoid­ing 5th century Athens. So for instance Icarus would be based on Minoan styles, anything to do with the Trojan war Mycenae­an, Adonis would be based on Assyr­i­an art (it’s a fairly common theory that the Greeks borrowed the story off the Assyr­i­ans) etc etc.

My plan was to head into London earli­er and spend some time draw­ing stuff in situ, and then meet up with my friend Michael in the after­noon after he’d finished his lecture at uni. The whole gutter then fell off the side of the house so I had to hang around wait­ing for the build­ing manager to arrive to look at it, so I didn’t arrive at the museum til 3ish, so I only had time to take pictures. I then real­ised I had a stupid small memory card in the camera, so I only took pics of the things I needed for uni. All the pictures are of pre-clas­sic­al Greek art or Assyr­i­an art, although we did look at quite a lot of the other stuff in the museum (stuffed crocodiles and calves espe­cially). I’ve got a reflec­tion prob­lem in quite a few of the pictures, and some aren’t as sharp as they could be, but I was in a hurry to get everything I needed.

Cyclad­ic statues, about 3000 years old

Minoan pots. The Minoans were really into octopuses. Let’s be pedant­ic and call them octo­podes, eh? οι οκτοποδες. There, putting that educa­tion into some use.

The Mycenae­ans on the other hand, preferred their bling.

Mycenae­an heads.

Mycenae­an birds.

Archa­ic pottery (ie the peri­od right before what people think of as Ancient Greece)

I love the expres­sions on these little figur­ines. I wonder if the potter was bored?

Red figure pottery.

Black figure pottery.

Michael inspect­ing a giant scarab in the Egypt gallery.

Assyr­i­an lamassu gate­post. Giant man-bird-lion-bull thing. One of my favour­ite things in the museum. I took loads of detail pictures for draw­ing.

Mural of a king lion hunt­ing. He’s so hard he can strangle lions with one hand. I also took a lot of detail pictures of assor­ted dying lions here.

My favour­ite dying lion. Ooh me back!

I like the way they carve trees like feath­ers.

I love this griffin guy’s expres­sion.

Good fun had by all. I like museums.