The Paintings

These twelve paintings are selected from a series of twenty-six paintings completed in early 1994. They are all acrylic on paper, 8" x 10". All are based on the photographic illustrations from a book (Venedikov, Ivan & Todor Gerassimov, Thracian Art Treasures, (Bulgarski Houdozhnik Publishing House, Sofia: 1975), 2nd edition 1979, translated by Marguerite Alexieva and Petco Drenkov). In this virtual exhibition I have matched my painting with the illustration description quoted from the book and they are listed in chronological order of the original objects. I began the series because the images intrigued me and I didn't know why. Each day I would choose a subject that caught my eye and try to paint it.

Ancient Thrace lay between the two great civilizations of its day—Greece and the Oriental kingdoms of Assyria, Babylonia and Persia. The Thracian civilization lasted from the sixth century BC until the third century BC when they were first weakened by a long struggle with Lysimachus, the Macedonian heir of Alexander the Great and then overrun by the Celts in 279 BC. All we know of them today is drawn from contemporary descriptions of them by their Greek neighbours and the hoards of gold treasure that they buried with their kings and nobles.

Thracian craftsmen borrowed freely from both Oriental and Greek traditions and melded them with their own tradition of animal imagery. Occasionally, the objects are almost literal copies of Greek or Persian originals. I was painting from a printed offset lithograph of a photograph of an object that had been originally copied from another object. The flow of artistic ideas and images had reached several thousand years forward in time. I'm still not sure what words I should put to go with these images. I feel a certain partnership with all the individuals who passed these images along. Maybe that's the only important thing.

Mary Krieger