When Ancient Art Sparks New Illumination
2023 brought an unexpected gift: the kind of adventure that shifts your artistic perspective permanently. My "kjærlighetsmake"—Norwegian for "love match," a term that captures something more profound than boyfriend or partner—had enhanced our Oregon life with his intuitive fathering, creating an instant blended family. When he proposed a month-long journey through Greece and Italy, focusing on art and archaeology, I said yes to what would become one of the most transformative experiences of my creative life.
Traveling for a month with five males—my kjærlighetsmake, his two boys, his father, and my youngest son—sounds like the setup for either a sitcom or a survival story, depending on your perspective. In reality, it became something magical: a multi-generational exploration of human creativity spanning millennia. Each family member brought their own curiosity and energy to ancient sites, creating a dynamic that made every museum, every ruin, every archaeological wonder feel like a collaborative discovery.
The boys ranged in age from young enough to be amazed by everything to old enough to ask sophisticated questions about technique and historical context. Watching them engage with art and artifacts that had survived thousands of years added layers of meaning to every site we visited. My kjærlighetsmake's father, with his decades of life experience, provided perspective that helped us understand how the art we were seeing connected to broader patterns of human expression and survival.
What struck me most powerfully during our Mediterranean journey wasn't just the subject matter of ancient art, but how light itself had been treated as both medium and message across cultures and centuries. In Greek temples, I observed how architects had designed spaces to capture and channel specific qualities of sunlight at particular times of day. In Italian churches, I marveled at how artists had used painted light to create spiritual atmosphere, making stone spaces feel alive with divine presence.
But it was the smaller objects—oil lamps, candle holders, luminaries that had once brought intimate light to domestic spaces—that sparked my imagination most directly. These weren't grand architectural achievements but humble functional objects that had transformed dark spaces into places where families gathered, where stories were told, where daily life unfolded under the gentle glow of flame.
Returning to Oregon after a month immersed in Mediterranean art and archaeology felt like returning with new eyes. The community college studio that had seemed merely functional before now felt like a laboratory for exploring connections between ancient traditions and contemporary expression. My hands, which had been focused on practical housewares, suddenly wanted to create objects that could hold and shape light itself.
This marked my initial foray into ceramic lighting, and like most first attempts at something completely new, it was characterized by ambitious vision and humbling technical reality. Clay that had cooperated beautifully for bowls and plates proved temperamental when asked to become complex lighting forms. The community college kilns, unpredictable under the best circumstances, became even more challenging when loaded with experimental pieces that pushed the boundaries of structural integrity.
My inspiration was celestial—I wanted to create pieces that could bring the mystery and beauty of night sky phenomena into interior spaces. Moon phases, star patterns, the subtle gradations of twilight sky—all of these became source material for lighting designs that would transform ordinary rooms into spaces of wonder and contemplation.
The technical challenges were immediate and humbling. Creating ceramic forms that could safely house electrical components while maintaining artistic integrity required learning entirely new skills. Wall thickness had to be calculated not just for structural soundness but for light transmission. Glaze choices affected not only visual appearance but how light would filter through or reflect off surfaces.
Many pieces didn't survive the process. The community college studio environment, chaotic on good days, proved particularly challenging for delicate lighting experiments. Complex forms that had taken hours to construct would crack during drying. Pieces that survived the bisque firing would emerge from glaze firings transformed in unexpected and often unusable ways.
Among all the casualties and experiments, one piece emerged triumphant: The Moon. This wasn't just a functional lighting element but a sculptural piece that captured something essential about the lunar presence that had inspired Mediterranean artists for millennia. The form suggested the moon's changing phases while creating patterns of light and shadow that transformed our wall into a constantly shifting canvas.
The Moon survived every stage of the treacherous creation process—the initial forming, the risky drying period in the active studio environment, the unpredictable community college kiln firings that had claimed so many of its siblings. When it finally made it onto our Oregon wall, illuminated and casting its gentle patterns across our living space, it felt like more than an artistic achievement. It was proof that inspiration gathered in ancient places could find expression in contemporary forms, that the same human impulse to transform darkness into beauty transcended centuries and continents.
The celestial lighting phase represented more than just another artistic evolution—it was the first body of work I created as part of a new kind of family. The month in Greece and Italy hadn't just exposed me to ancient art; it had shown me what it felt like to experience wonder as part of a community that supported and amplified each other's curiosity.
My kjærlighetsmake understood that my need to create wasn't separate from my capacity to love but integral to it. The boys in our blended family learned to see artistic inspiration as something that could strike anywhere—in museum galleries, at archaeological sites, during long conversations over Mediterranean dinners where we processed everything we had seen and experienced.
The lighting work that emerged from our Mediterranean journey carried within it layers of accumulated human wisdom about the relationship between light and meaning. Every culture we had encountered had developed sophisticated approaches to bringing illumination into dark spaces, and each had understood that functional lighting could also be deeply spiritual, transformative, magical.
The Moon, hanging on our Oregon wall, became a bridge between ancient traditions and contemporary life. It connected our everyday domestic space to the cosmic wonder that had inspired artists for thousands of years. It proved that a month spent studying how other humans had used creativity to make sense of their world could spark innovations that brought new beauty into our own daily experience.
The community college studio, with all its chaos and unpredictability, had served as the perfect laboratory for this exploration. Like the ancient workshops where craftspeople had learned their trades through trial and error, apprenticeship and experimentation, it provided the space where inspiration could meet material reality and, occasionally, create something beautiful enough to survive both the journey and the destination.
