Mosaic Excavation with Carpets (2024) Egg tempera, acrylic gouache, and India ink on panel; 36 x 60 in. The painting hangs on the wall of Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library.
Images courtesy of James Gold

CFA Alumni

The Museum of the Mind

Inspired by objects unearthed on archaeological digs, James Gold paints artifacts of his own invention, from papyrus scrolls to woven tapestries to stone mosaics

The painting is real. It hangs, five feet wide and three feet tall, on the wall of BU’s Mugar Memorial Library. The artifacts it depicts are not. They were born in the mind of the painter, James Gold.

“My work has to do with transformation, taking something real and then using intuition and imagination to transform it into something else,” says Gold (’24). “These objects have a past, even though they’re entirely fictional.”

Welcome to the museum of the mind.

Digging In

How do you create an imaginary historical artifact so convincing that it wouldn’t seem out of place in an antiquities collection? The answer: lots and lots of research. Gold, who came to the School of Visual Arts for his master’s degree in painting after completing his bachelor’s at The Cooper Union, kindled a lifelong fascination with archaeology while growing up in Providence, R.I. His mother, a librarian, would often save for him books the library was planning to toss, including volumes on the history of design and accounts of famous archaeological digs.

“It’s always surprising, the little things that will come up in research,” he says. “I’m interested in how different interiors are made, what the different materials and trends were, the history of ornamentation, and how it applies through time.”

The books were a jumping-off point for Gold’s imagination: by collaging images he found compelling, he was able to compare a medieval European tapestry to an Ottoman one, Byzantine mosaics alongside ancient Roman frescoes. The cultural and geological contexts would blend together, creating a new archaeological epoch in his mind—one with its own handicraft processes and aesthetics.

“I’ll put an ancient [artifact] next to modern art, or combine different historical bits or anything that just feels a bit incongruous,” he says, “But I’ll weave them together in a way that visually makes sense.”

While Gold claims not to favor any particular historical era, his most striking works, done in mixed media on large-scale wood panels, evoke the Classic civilizations of the Mediterranean: Greco-Roman, Etruscan, early Byzantine. His fondness for rich hues, sumptuous textures, and heraldry are evident in his Night & Day diptych, which features two sets of ancient symbols—twirling vines, crossed arrows, crescent moons, and astrolabes—one set rendered in deep indigo and the other in vivid crimson and gold.

“When I was at BU, I discovered this encyclopedia of heraldry, which included some of the images I used in Night & Day—which also looks like an ancient Roman mosaic in some ways,” he says. “I make these artifacts by taking something from one source and transferring it through another, like heraldry into mosaic, or a mosaic into weaving. It’s a game to be played through painting.”

During his time at BU, Gold also felt compelled to audit an archaeology class taught by Andrea Berlin, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of archaeology and religion, and the James R. Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology at CAS. She picked up on his enthusiasm and, once the course had ended for the semester, secured him a spot on an archaeological dig in Larnaka, Cyprus—not a common occurrence for most CFA students. His job was to make detailed illustrations of whatever the researchers unearthed.

“It was a different way of approaching objects: rather than just describing the textures and painting it free-form, or simply inventing things, it’s all about exact measurements on a one-to-one scale,” he says. “I’m holding this object in my gloved hand, trying to draw it like a photograph.”

Ensconced in the Larnaka Museum, Gold made his way through a backlog of finds, re-creating them with a Staedtler pen through an intricate process that showed each crack, divot, and warp more intimately than a photograph could. Working in such an exacting, scientific manner was a sort of boot camp for the artist, and it bore a lasting influence on his process.

“I’m trying to see how convincing of a texture I can get, how convincing of an artifact,” he says. “Does this seem like something that has always existed?”

Creating Something Real

“I think a lot about the sense of touch when I’m working on a painting,” Gold says. “If I’m feeling a cool tile floor or the woven fibers of a textile, how do I translate that?”

The main tools in his arsenal are egg tempera, India ink, and acrylic gouache, which he uses in different proprietary combinations to recreate the velvety feel of papyrus or the smooth gloss of ceramic, at times layering medium on top of medium. Sometimes he’ll mix his own paints and gessos, adding marble chalk to give them extra granularity. He’ll also use sandpaper to slough away layers of paint and gesso to achieve roughness, or scratch at the surface with a stylus. The finished product has gone through layer upon layer of iteration to achieve realism.

“I feel like there’s a little bit of an alchemical or ritual sense to my process for each material,” he says. “People will say, ‘I can’t believe it’s not really a textured mosaic on the wall, or a textured carpet.’ I’m like, Go ahead and touch it.

“I think about presentation a lot, and I do feel like I’m making an imaginary museum,” says Gold. “Each viewer has a subjective experience, too, in terms of what’s real or what’s invented. I enjoy all of the different reactions that I get.”

The museum of the mind was open for business in September, at Gold’s first solo show. Following a residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, he showed eight works at an exhibition at the Morgan Lehman Gallery in Manhattan.

“It’s fun to have a kind of control over what’s real,” he says, “and having this sense of illusion and play is definitely the driving force behind all of it.”