When I first saw an image of this "beware of dog" mosaic from
Ancient Rome, I immediately fell in love with it. What appeals to me
most is the disconnect between the warning aspect of the mosaic and the
playful, happy appearance of the dog. So, last week, while Mya was
working on her brown trout mosaic, I decided to recreate a version of
the Cave Canem mosaic. I would have liked to use marble, but
I think glass actually works better in this case, making the piece
bolder and brighter.
The Roman mosaic I based it on is here.
Although I worked directly from a printout of the image, there are a
few things I changed. The most important change was to improve the andamento, the way rows of tesserae
flow to emphasize the overall form. In the original mosaic, there were
a couple areas where the tile was just filled in with no regard to the
actual musculature of a dog. If you compare the flow of tile where the
dog's right shoulder and rear leg meet the body, I think you'll agree
that they look a little better than the original mosaic.
I had originally intended to inscribe the piece with the Latin for beware of dog, cave canem.
But as I was working on the piece, I became more and more uncomfortable
with that idea… for one thing, the dog isn't scary looking, which is
what I like about him. He's playful. More importantly, I kind of feel
like the world is far too full of warnings and dire threats these days
and I just don't want to contribute to the culture of fear even on a minor level.
This is
where it came in really handy to have a visiting Latin scholar. Mya is
a classics geek of the first order, which is funny, really, since I on
the other hand pretty much consider the dawn of time to be circa 1900.
Anyway, she grabbed her Latin dictionary and we tried for a while to
come up with something that would be more on the order of "good dog" or
"happy puppy." Of course, going through a Latin dictionary, it becomes
quickly apparent that almost all the words relate to politics, war and
death. I'd forgotten what a totally militaristic world view they had,
and have to admit to some surprise on finding that culture reflected so
strongly in the vocabulary they had to work with. This is the kind of
thing that makes being an artist so much fun really— you start out with
a simple idea like recreating an ancient door mat, and by the time
you're half-way through you're doing amateur cultural analysis based on
how the words available to a culture influence what and how they can
think. heh. (story continued below…)
| Lupus
Ludi, 2005 |
| medium |
Vitreous glass tile, Hardibacker substrate, steel frame |
| size |
32.5" x 35.75" x .75" (frame dimensions)
mosaic is 32" x 32" |
| availability |
Unique piece, act quick! |
| price |
$1,800.00, Free Shipping via FedEx Ground |
| |
Purchase item for $1800 |
| |
|
So we were a bit confounded at first. We came up with a couple
possible captions, but I was making it more difficult by insisting that
the new phrase should be as sweet, short, alliterative and assonant as
the original. The best we could do with the dictionary was candidus catellus,
which, with a stretch of the imagination can be translated as "shiny,
happy puppy." Candidus is the root of our word candidate of course, and
is normally translated to mean "white" (go figure). However, it can
also mean shiny or happy. I figured it would be too confusing though on
the whole, and besides, the letters would not have fit as well, nor did
it have the proper assonance. So we put it hold for a bit and went back
to cutting tile. Then Mya said something about a piece we'd heard on
NPR where they were interviewing people about their relationship to the
US government. One guy had said something to the effect that he really
didn't care one way or the other about the war, the economy or stem
cells, but he really wished that they would let him shoot the
endangered wolves that were eating his cattle. And suddenly, bang, I
had it. Lupus Ludi: playful wolf. Really, what I mean is "happy dog" or
"playful dog," but I figure it's close enough. And it has all the
linguistic aspects I wanted: short, sweet, easy to guess, alliteration
and assonance.
I guess this is what happens when you lock a former poet and a classics geek in a room with a bunch of tile.
Tags: dog, mosaic, glass mosaic, latin, cave canem, beware of dog
