I went to the Virginia Fine Arts Museum in Richmond again yesterday. I love that place. Always something new to see. Always something there to excite me and get some pictures done. I'll have to add a few extra pages this month.

For reasons unknown to me they have a very decent collection of Roman Art and they take a lot of care to present it well. Cochrane Court is a part of it (I guess). Sounds like a new mall but that's the name on the wall here. I stood in one point slightly off the central axis and took a bunch of small images. I made five 'columns of images' first with a couple of smaller sections and then played with them in different ways. This one started with the center and I added the others after playing further with each one. It's a mix of hiding the joins, displaying the joins and ignoring the joins. Some parts I fooled around with to 'fix' to another part. Other bits, for instance the pillars to the right, are distorted to the point of caricature and start to become flat. It's all a...collection. These unique pieces are here to represent 'Art' but from various cultures and time periods and made for, often, quite practical purposes. They only make sense as a whole to us because we don't understand them well. It is all so clean and organized it must mean something clever and important is what we think. Our ignorance is a pleasant buffer to the diversities on view. I'm not knocking it (totally). But we really are jackdaws collecting shiny objects without an independent source to question our logic.

During the process I was left with the shards at the top but as they reminded me of the Louvre prism I kept them in. It's a lot of fuss putting ceiling windows together and I didn't bother with this one, not much.

At this size you are forced to see it as a whole. While I was working on it I noticed some unintended bits. The detail below works for me. Putting a bit of the chaos back into the order. Ha.