Kelvin Wilson - archaeological illustrator

03/11/2025

PRINTS FOR CHRISTMAS

For a short time only, I am taking orders for art prints. There are three prints available:

THE LINEN WORKER.
This lady from the 7th century may have well been local aristocracy, yet a groove in her teeth showed evidence of time also spent on homecrafts. It suggests she used her mouth to wet the thread she spun into linen.

THE VIKING GIRL.
In the 10th century Dublin was a centre of Viking power, and a port with international connections. Young town women wore, as evidenced by archaeological finds, fancy caps of imported silk.

THE CHIEF.
Though not much remained of the Bronze Age man buried at Lille Dragshøj, in Denmark, those few remains were indeed remarkable. A wooden cup decorated with tiny metal studs marked him as an important man in his community, whereas his preserved scalp of hair… well, it is difficult to say what it meant, but we can see his style was to have a mohawk and mullet. Remarkable, indeed.

The prints are giclees, printed on heavy paper at a size of 20 by 30 centimeters. The price is 40 euros each, plus postage.

To order, please send me your address in a pm, list which print you require, and please state whether you want the print signed (in pencil, at the bottom). All orders will be collected and completed on November 14, 2025.

01/11/2025

For the past three years I have done research and this last year, have been writing a book. Yes, it touches on archaeology in places, yes, it certainly is as visually minded as you would expect from me, but the subject is something very different...

In September 1944 the last train to leave Holland for Poland roughly unloaded its cargo of humans onto the platform at Auschwitz. There they were split up. The old and the very young went to one side. A group of women stood on the other side, wondering what was going on...

Those women are the subject of my book, called (in translation) "Ash. The Women of the Last Transport". Their numbers included Anne Frank, as well as some whose survival meant that they later were able to give testimonies as to what they had gone through.

Some left diaries too. Or poems, written behind barbed wire. Indeed, even the lyrics to the songs they made up in their barrack, lamenting their fate and mocking their guards, have been rediscovered.

I am at about three quarters into writing the book of their experiences, non-fiction with plentiful footnotes. The detail is unique, but what sets it even more apart are the visual elements.

Objects which were smuggled into the camps, or crafted there, and taken home after liberation, have suffered by the 80 years since. Yet I am reconstructing them as new. To séé the history indeed says more than a thousand words!

I have also researched, by studying contemporary photographs but also drawings made by inmates, what the camps looked like at the time. What colour were the barracks? Where were their numbers located? What I am gearing up to do, is to paint these scenes--- one of which for the first time ever will show the precise barrack which housed aforementioned Anne Frank.

This is information no-one else has, other researchers confirmed to me. It is quite emotional, again, to séé it.

But what I at present do not have, are the means to continue at the work. As well as it has been going, it remains intense and as always very time-consuming. It has bled me dry.

Therefore, I have started a GoFundMe.... https://gofund.me/55277286f

Please consider supporting this project. Details on the GoFundMe page are in Dutch, but I am happy to send anyone who so requests an English language version!

And oh, what of the link with archaeology? Last Spring I spent several weeks in Poland, every day walking the now overgrown site of the camp where Anne Frank's bunk mates, having been separated from her, spent the last months of the war. I measured the place like an archaeologist would, I prodded to find concrete remains under the soil. And I did find the fence poles inbetween which, once, barbed wire was stretched.

When I pointed them out to the people now living opposite, they, like I, shuddered a little.

In de nacht van 5 september 1944 stopte een trein in Auschwit… Kelvin Wilson needs your support for STEUN MIJN BOEK: "As. De vrouwen van het laatste transport"

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...