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THE DREAMING
The oldest cave painting modern humans have found is in Borneo, painted more than 40,000 years ago. Bison held our earliest spark of inspiration and led us to grind minerals, burn charcoal, and paint by firelight in deepest darkness of caves. Pigment mingled and held with the moisture of rock, as our own fire-lit shadows danced with painted animals.
Can you see it?
I have a sense of awe in understanding that we have been making images for more than 40,000 years. In Chauvet cave in France there is a series of overlapping bison. Scientists have carbon dated these beasts in paint, discovering that the first was rendered 5,000 years before the last. These paintings give us a sense of belonging on Earth in a deep time scale that we can hardly fathom in our present. We make art as a progression of our souls—as our own sacred hall of records. And it all began in a cave of dreams.
When I make art in connection with animal spirits, I shape shift. I straddle the body of another while maintaining my own. This doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it is astounding. I remember drawing a mountain gorilla and I was drawing the delicate, transitioning folds of light and shadow around his eyes and felt with total clarity that as I was creating him, he was creating me. We shared a stream of energy, and though we would part independently again, we would be forever changed. My own paintings become a sacred hall of records.
