Temple for the cupbearers of Zeus (alt title: If)
Concept art for my Alexander the Great graphic novel.
The temple isn’t real, though based on the Erechtheion. I was just ITCHING to realise my take on ancient Greek statues and architecture. YAY COLOURS!!
Here’s the story: I always thought the recreations of technicolour Greece done by museums looked so gaudy. So for a while I lazily accepted (and celebrated) the idea that ancient Greece was technicolour camp town. Until a few days ago when I was walking around Georgetown, Penang, glancing at the colourful Chinese temples that are so mundane and familiar to me… SUDDENLY, BOOM! BAM! It hit me. All the gorgeous Chinese and HIndu temples I grew up seeing in KL and Georgetown – with their statues of gods and reliefs and roofs and walls painted in all sorts of bright colours… THAT WAS SIMILAR TO ANCIENT GREECE. I didn’t notice I’m actually living and experiencing the aesthetic!! AND GUESS WHAT, THE COLOURS ARE NOT GAUDY OR CAMPY AT ALL! They are beautiful and bright and dazzling, so it’s not the colours that are bad, but the Museum Context (lol thanks colonialism and western standards of art). So armed with this precious lived knowledge (very important; now technicolour ancient Greece is as mundane as modern day Malaysia. It is no more Other) I wanted to try replicating the mundane beauty I see in my technicolour temples into the landscape and architecture of ancient Greece.
I always had the intention to depict Alexander’s home as colourful, but after this epiphany, I like that it’s going to be closer to home now.
