After "Coffee on the carpet" I decided that in order to keep my imagination fresh I should vary the subject matter between canvases, so after a Still Life a picture with human figures in it, to be followed by?
This picture came to me as I was looking at pictures of ancient Greek painted pottery. I sat doodling and a face emerged; of a hooded male sitting at a table on a sort of "greek" chair as seen on the vase paintings, hidden in heavy shadows. I sketched in some dangling greenery behind him. That prompted me to add two more figures . I had the idea that this could explain the Emmaus story:
The three travellers have been in hot Mediterranean sun on their walk from Jerusalem. To keep the sun off them one of them has the hood of his robe pulled forward and the other two are wearing broad brimmed hats. These hats also appear on the vases, so for a group of people from multi cultural Galilee, this was quite plausible. They had arrived at a n knee towards sunset and sat under a vine trellis which threw shadows onto the wall behind them.
Hungrily they tear up the bread that has been offered them to take the edge off their appetites. You can se it lying on the table as one of them reaches across to take a piece.
As on of them starts to serve a drink, something about the way he is holding the cup for a libation reminds them of the way this was done at the Last Supper... The cup is "greek."
That is what I told myself as I set them round the table. There would have been more food coming and I decided to include a younger version of myself as the boy bringing roast pigeons from the kitchen. My family used to eat a lot of roast pigeons like this , with bread and wine and other mezzo.
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