Villa Painting

On what was to be my fourth day of excavation, something happened that was a little bit lucky for me, although I don't want to brag about benefiting from the misfortune of others. (If I'm being honest, though, that's what happened...) My buddy Halley overslept, because she wasn't feeling well. Which meant that she missed the bus to site, and they needed someone to fill in for her at the villa, assisting Dorotea with painting. And Ellen asked me!

So Sofia and I spent the next three days, as it turned out, helping to paint the villa. Now, two rooms are being painted in the villa right now - the green room, and the red room. (Both are so named because of the predominant color of their walls...) Dorotea started the green room first, and was working on the last wall of it when we arrived. She also wanted to start the red room, though, and now, with two assistants, she was ready to work on both rooms at once.

After experimenting with string line grids, (which are terribly authentic and Roman!) Dorotea sent me in to begin the red room, while Sofia assisted her in the green room.


This is a completed wall in the green room. Isn't it beautiful? Those pomegranates in the niche are real - Dorotea eats them every day, and they are delicious.



Here are Sofia and Dorotea working on the last wall of the green room, painting white hearts. Really, they are supposed to be rose petals, if we look with Roman eyes, but they look like hearts to me... Regardless, they are a lot of them. It takes a long time to paint them, especially since Dorotea painted them and then Sofia traced over each one to make the white more opaque.

So during all of this hard work, where was I?


In the red room, which was white at first. But I am dressed to match the future! As I paint white gesso on white walls, preparing them for red paint. I couldn't tell whether I had just painted an area or not! It felt very dangerous to move on from any one spot, but I made it somehow. And it turned out okay when I painted it red, so I guess I got most places!


Sofia visited to help me paint that huge wall red! (We kept quoting that old Doors song, remember? Paint it Black? But we said red. Obviously.) Don't we look like we're having so much fun? That's because we are.



After we painted the first wall red, Dorotea realized that the wall next to the door had to be sanded before it could be painted or gessoed, because the plaster was extremely rough. So we covered up our hair and got ourselves covered in very fine plaster dust. We had to sweep so much of it off the ground!


Then we painted it! And before we painted over it, we painted our names. Which we then covered up. But I was running out of paint, so I added a bit more water, and you can still read Sofia's name, and my "C," a bit too clearly. Soon I'll cover it up in another layer, I hope...


There it is with the new grid! That Sofia and I made with white paint and string. After Dorotea laid out the lines. You can also see the beautiful yellow line I started painting along the top of the wall!

I am so excited for the red room to begin to look more like the green room. (It has a similar design.) Hopefully I will get to be there again to help paint more of it!