Kelvin Wilson - archaeological illustrator, Ridderkerk (2025)

19/05/2025

Last week I gave a talk at an archaeological museum on the fashions of Europe's earliest farmers. It was my fourth time to do the same talk, in different countries and multiple languages. So I would like to advertise I am available to do it a fifth, and a sixth, or seventh time...

In the words of the organiser:

"Wow… what an evening!

An inspiring story about fashion in the early Neolithic, told with knowledge, humor and beautiful visuals. It was very special to see the room fill with both professional archaeologists and interested enthusiasts — exactly the meeting of worlds we had in mind.

Afterwards there was an enthusiastic response and the request for a sequel!"

Oh, yeah: despite being an hour and a half, it is a two-parter. For an eight, ninth, or tenth time...

14/04/2025

In the first week of its opening, I can finally show the painting I made for the National Museum of the 80-Year War (Nationaal Museum Tachtigjarige Oorlog), in the town of Groenlo, the Netherlands.

It depicts the final days of the siege of Groenlo, in the summer of 1627, in a manner anyone watching the news today would understand. Property is destroyed, soldiers are traumatised, people must flee-- and the animals left behind howl.

I highly recommend the museum. For as heavy as my painting, the exhibits's final piece, may seem, the museum people have found a lighter way of presenting the story behind it. War may always be a destructive process, a creative museum like theirs will teach us how it avoid it best.

https://www.nmto.nl/

27/03/2025

Recently, Cork University Press published the definite collection of articles by textile historian Elizabeth Wincott Heckett. The hefty volume, "Textiles of Ireland: Archaeology, Craft, Art", was edited by Mary Ann Williams and features illustrations by yours truly.

The selection below shows a cap from Viking-era Dublin; the reconstruction of an Early Medieval woman whose teeth showed evidence of thread working; the set of typical 16th-century Irish clothes found in the castle which is now the home of actor Jeremy Irons; and very touching, the dress found on the body of a 17th-century girl who died in childhood. That dress had been quite well-made out of intricately stitched tubes of cloth, but was a hand-me-down, torn and refit, by time it clothed this girl of a much lower class.

Now she is the star, though.

03/03/2025

I am still here, I really am-- but have been occupied, and still am, with writing a book! I shall not yet disclose what it is about, but instead share the latest of my paintings, made in time between the here where I was and the there I am working towards being!

So, please point your gaze out across the tidal rivers crisscrossing the delta of the northwest European Neolithic, and watch them go, its swampdwelling inhabitants, as they too move from here to there...

10/01/2024

The new year is in, and though the last day of the one and the first day of the next were no different from each other, common feeling is one should end-, and the next start things.

In my case, I fear, unresolved old matters hold me back. A lot of my projects had to be carried into the new year because they take so much thought and design, then rethinking and a lot of redesigning... if I ever feel short of time, it is in part due to this dissonance in designing as presently real what is actually an imagination of past reality. It breaks my brain too.

The best mark of the new year, therefore, was when I found some unobstructed time to finally start to paint part of one commission. The subject: a 15th-century clerk and consultant. The concept: a riser through the ranks, he had shown his lord such good work that he was allowed to purchase for himself a castle. The idea: to paint him not as a one-dimensional reconstruction of appearance, but as someone you might believe achieved all that...

The subject of my (under)painting was a true selfmade man, even though what you see and believe about him now-- and let this simpler statement bring the new year in, and carry me through it--, truly my imagination alone made.

29/12/2023

The archaeological highlight of the year, as far as I am concerned, is one so superficially out of place that it in a good way upsets one's preconceived concept of the past. Archaeology is good at doing that, usually, and never more so than with this find: a terracotta portrait sculpture, found broken in pieces.

If you look at my reconstruction sketch below-- drawn on the back of a printout yet liked so much I just had to frame it!--, you will likely think this buste is, say, a Buddhist relic. It shows hair spiked up like flames or flower buds, and large jewellery strung around the ears. The lips are modeled almost to a kiss, the eyes large.

The truth is, this is a face from Iron Age Europe. It dates to around 2,500 years ago, and was found in southwest Spain. Previous to this being found (as well as another quite like it), archaeologists had no idea what the people of the local Tarsessos culture looked like, even though they were praised by their contemporaries as pivotal, wealthy tradesmen in tin.

Now science has been given a glimpse of them, it is nothing like expected. Indeed, this remarkable discovery goes a long way in showing that with each passing year, the past just keeps getting stranger!

14/12/2023

The full illustration made to the sketch you saw yesterday: a spread opening an article in "Archaeology" magazine. My brief was to show the er****on of the stones, utilising new knowledge about the hammer stones and a theoretical sled.

Taking it further, I drew an image about clans too, about friends and family sharing food, and about the English weather.

I turned the dry archaeology into a scene damp with life.

13/12/2023

Yesterday, a broad gathering of protesters (including archaeologists) demonstrated in central London against the UK government's plans to dig a tunnel next to Stonehenge. Everyone, it seems, is for a tunnel to replace the current motorway closely grazing the site-- it's just that to save them on costs, the government's track is set to destroy much more of the immediate landscape.

In 2007, when I was asked by Archaeology magazine, in the USA, to illustrate the building of Stonehenge some 4,000 years earlier, I did my best to steer away from the unimaginative visualisations I'd grown up with-- of blonde bearded men in bearskins hauling at ropes.

Instead, I sought to build a world apart from ours, and to dip the viewer toes deep into a mystery. You can see where I took that in the preliminary sketch (I will show the final painting tomorrow) below. With their woven mats covering them against the rain, the builders become like abstract figures. Their world consists of thick ropes and knotted grasses. Their faces are mere shadows...

Because to me Stonehenge is about what we cánnot see. There is a whole world there, a whole different belief system by people very different from us-- a world we have to approach with care, digging down with toothbrushes, so as to not disturb. So perhaps what the protesters are against, is the government's concept that what we see at present is the best it will ever get.

They, and so would I, protest the lack of imagination.

11/12/2023

I don't draw with my hands, I told someone recently. "No, I draw with my head".

It's a common thing amongst historical illustrators, apparently, to enjoy the research so much, you think the image merely has to carry that enthusiasm across. But if I did research and then made a drawing of it, it would still be about the drawing! What I do instead, is do research, then strip it down to one central idea, hopefully a surprising twist on expectations, and then try to find a visual way of communicating that.

So I don't draw, I design. Central to the ex*****on is whether I can communicate the narrative. If I could do it with matchstick collages, I would.

The illustration below was made for a museum in Belgium. The given subject-- which I was given a free hand to interpret-- was a Bronze Age hoard consisting of a woman's rich jewellery plus a whole load of axeheads. My own tools were, and are, visual language. So the image becomes all about about composition, about light, and about manipulating the viewer's eyes and brain towards a certain set of interpretations.

It is like having a statement in mind, and as you speak it not being too prissy about the mere shape of the letters, and concentrate instead on putting into an effective order all the words.

Visual language, indeed.

05/12/2023

Wanna see more of my reconstructions of prehistoric man- or woman-shaped figurines, redrawn so as to be more clear on what they are shown wearing?

Oh, I have plenty. The last year I have been drawing these almost like a muscle exercise at the rate of one, two, or three a day!

Some take some careful deliberation, though. I had to contact the experts on the one below, and could only do it with their gracious help. It is a stunner: a fragment of a Linear Pottery (6th-5th millennia BCE) figurine found in Thüringen, former Eastern Germany. The final version of my reconstruction of it, complete, is supplemented by the design (and has the colouring of) a very similar find. I believe it shows us that....

Well, make your own judgement. I don't wanna be telling you everything, eh?

04/12/2023

These socalled 'plank idols' of the Cypriote Philia culture, late third millennium BCE, were redrawn by me, clean and clear, to demonstrate what Europe's earliest metalworkers wore in their daily life.

The Philia people weren't originally from Cyprus, you see, but sailed over with their metal tools and their herds of cattle on the wave of the Bell Beaker phenomena. That narrative will be a simplification, I admit, as are the way they portrayed themselves in these small clay models.

But those do allow one to see what they saw, a glance into the past otherwise easily overlooked. Necklaces were important, it seems. And decorated belts. Patterned clothing too. Those idols might also show tattooed faces.

We perhaps have a simplified idea of the past, even in prehistoric times real life was truly richly adorned.

13/11/2023

"You are foremost a designer. If the context in which your illustration is presented does not work, the illustration will not work."

That is what I told my student recently. Of course I too was once a student, of course I once was not yet able to oversee the whole picture. So, seventeen years ago when I was asked to illustrate a leaflet on the earliest history of the Dutch town of Leeuwarden, instead of simply making it into a series of pictures, I imagined it as a new world I needed to design.

Now, the clouds over an Early Medieval coastal village curl themselves into dragons such as the people below carved so often. And the Iron Age man who supposedly kept an ancestor's skull in his house, he has become a Hamlet-type figure, contemplating death like both fictional and living people do with poetic thoughts on their mind.

What I mean is: I could have just drawn simple houses under a grey sky, or a man in a strange costume, but realised myself, and just on time, the poetry only comes out in the design.

Kelvin Wilson - archaeological illustrator

19/05/2025

14/04/2025

27/03/2025

03/03/2025

10/01/2024

29/12/2023

14/12/2023

13/12/2023

11/12/2023

05/12/2023

04/12/2023

13/11/2023

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