The Amazing not a Race: Mishmash

I figured since I have good wifi here, I might as well do another blog post about the last few days, skipping around a bit. After Kotor,we drove north,stopping along the way to view some Roman mosaics, which were rather recently discovered in the ruins of a villa that was over 2,000 years old.

Since we were the only ones there, the nice young woman walked us through the place, describing the imagery and symbolism of each one. As you can see, these are extremely intricate, and each piece of stone is only about 1/2 inch square. But what a wonderful floor covering!

This is the most famous image( it must be because it is on the ticket stub)of a winged figure reclining on a couch. They were all beautiful. Who needs to go to Pompeii to see Mosaics?!

After that, we drove a short way up the road to see some prehistoric wall paintings. We pulled off the road trying to find some sign, when we saw three people on the road and asked them for directions. No one spoke much English but between Italian, Spanish and English, we got the idea that they were up the road, then a short path. But watch out for snakes, the man said! Finally he told us he would take his dogs home and meet us at the path to show us the way. He had a stick to scare off the snakes, which made me feel better.

This is the one and only sign...

Along the way he pointed out various plants like sage, laurel and pomegranate trees. Finally we stopped and he said to look up at the cliff. There was a small herd of three or four deer painted on the rocks which we would have never seen without his guidance. It was a fun and serendipitous encounter.

From there, we drove uphill, finally realizing after a half an hour of driving through gorgeous rock formations that we were on the wrong road, so we turned around and headed back toward the water.

At lunchtime we were in Cavtat, which I only knew about from a chance encounter with an English woman in the airport. She was coming to Croatia to attend a watercolor workshop and told me the name of the instructor ( which I have since forgotten). I looked up his workshops and noticed they painted in Cavtat, so we stopped for lunch, and ended up staying the night. It was small and very picturesque. A perfect town to spend several days in, but we had one day, so tried to make the most of it.

First, lunch, because it started to rain and we wanted to take shelter

I liked this artful arrangement of a caprese salad.

Jim had the pork sashlik. matt makes a better version.

We took a walk around the beach side of town

I think I might even try sea kayaking if we were here longer.

But the view from our apartmani was nice to come back to.

By far the best thing we saw was the home and studio of Kuca Bukovac, a well known figure in the Croatian art community around the turn of the century.

I'm so glad we made the effort to find it, because not only was it a beautiful house, but the artist and his work were captivating. Though he spent a small amount of time there, he had decided to paint the interior while he was a teenager recuperating from a serious injury.

These were panels along all the lower parts of the walls.

And one ceiling. The entire two floors were painted in this fanciful fashion. I like the thought of a parent, when told by his son that he wanted to decorate the entire house in decorative painting, saying " ok, go ahead!". I visited the very famous Charleston House in England last spring, home to Virginia Wolf's sister and other famous artists. It was painted as well, but I much prefer this home in a tiny town in Croatia.

This was an early self portrait by the artist.

A view from the window of his purpose built studio, which was perhaps never used by him, in spite of the artful arrangement of painting equipment that was placed there.