Color Wheel of the Gods

OK... so after that beautiful day spent at the Aphaea Temple and ALL THOSE SKETCHES ... Julia had a conversation on the phone with the scenic designer (who is NOT on this recce trip for some reason). But SHE is in the states doing a shitload of research about authentic visual treatments for the picture. AND she alerted Julia about the recent discovery that these temples were NOT all lovely, creamy, glowing tones of white and off-white marble, as Julia thought. As we all thought. I mean, I took Ancient Art History my freshman year and I don't remember learning about this. (Well it was an 8AM and I did skip sometimes.)

But the bottom line is this: The temples were painted. The sculptures were painted. The pediments and metopes and architectural doodads were all painted.
Kitchy, garrish, vinyl-toy, saturated. Primary AND secondary AND tertiary colors!


So, we probably won't be shooting at Aphaea this summer. Even Aphaea didn't look like Aphaea. There was a big exhibit ... Gods In Color: Painted Sculpture Of Classical Antiquity. All about it, touring the world. The designer saw it at the Getty in LA. The research was done by guess who? Yep, Germans.

...more like this really. Byzanteenish color.

Julia says they will still use some of my storyboards, just not in the exact way we planned. Now they are having a big pow wow about how to create the temple locations, maybe moving away from ancient sites completely. The scenic designer (Andrea Hardy?) might fly in to Athens later this week. SO, what the bleep are we doing here?!

If necessary, I guess could get used to this place in glorious technicolor...

like this


or this


or this


yep, I could get used to this