I know what I’m searching for...

Well, I think I’ve been looking at so much cave art that it’s started me on one of my ‘journeys‘.

I have to admit, I’m excited but also a little scared.  Thoughts and ideas that I had a while ago are now sprouting seed leaves and starting to swell in my head.  But there are already ideas in there that are elbowing for room?  What is a mere mortal to do?

I’ve met a few people like this, they’re on a similar journey, but is the journey inward, or outward?  

So here’s the thing, when it’s was 11.59pm on 31st December 1999 and we were all watching pictures from round the world of people getting very excited about the new Millennium, fireworks, music, people squealing with delight, car horns, whistling etc, it was at that moment, that very moment of the clock striking 12 midnight that I had a weird experience.  

I basically saw everything in slow motion, all sound ceased and I kind of drifted off.  Where I drifted to was to the crystal clear realisation that we, all the millions of people in the world joined in that one moment were going to all be dead in about 100 years.  So there you have it, in that unique once-in-a-lifetime moment of joy and hope, I had intense confirmation that all that I could see, would be gone in not that long.  

So ok, we’ll be replaced, we won’t die out as a species, we might all go to live on another planet, there is hope for mankind, always.

But what about now? and more than that, what about all the millions and billions of people that preceded us?  We need to spare a thought for them. 

That’s why when I see a photo of a cave painting, or ice age sculpture made of bones and mammoth ivory, amber beads, fishing nets, fragments of textiles, human hair, all those remnants really me stop and wonder. 

Most poignant of all, I think are hand prints on cave walls.  Now we’re learning they were made mostly by women.  

There we were even then, confined, near the hearth, trying to mark our environment with a simple ‘I woz here’ emblem of a hand print.  Like the wave of a hand as we sail by, but this time from the past.  A simple human expression of being alive, made permanent.  

Ethereal doesn’t even begin to describe the vibration a human life leaves behind.  Where there were once people, they are always ‘echos’.

Remnants of Bronze Age hair particularly gets to me.  

But going back to Cave Art times, just think about it, in the days before combs, how to keep your hair tidy, but on display, was very important, so they devised a Paleo way to do both, and that was to make a criss-cross hair net, probably out of grass.  You see countless ice age sculptures of fertility Venus’ with the same hair net.  These artefacts span vast geographic regions.  But all are basically found either side of The Steppes.  

In fact, you can go on about hair forever.  

We’re all so advanced now and yet, we still all admire a good head of hair.  Think about it, why would you do that?  Hair is like nature itself sprouting from our cranium, I mean hair is so old, we don’t even need it anymore and yet billions are spent on this living fossil that grows out of our heads: hair?

So, I was dipping my foot into how to approach a reproduction of a piece of cave sculpture in 2-d, (I think 2-d is all I can hope for with all the stuff that’s happening in my life.) 

And so, I got some materials out and started, you know, doodling, scribbling, whatever you want to call it, I was trying to get in there, as they say, with all this creative stuff and this is what came out...

I can see water, sky, birds, landscape, vegetation, spray, mist, heat, light, sun, wood, smoke, a clearing, damp, humid, noise, wind and rain.

This is weird. I like it, it’s a surprise, especially when you look at how I managed to arrive at this point...

Basically I did a deconstruction type, David Bowie, Bauhaus process thing, where you experiment, overlay, distress, reorder and finally evaluate.

I saw this section first and realised finally it was happening.  

Then I saw this...

This one is better, but not as ok as the one I said I liked.  I think what this one says is wistful, eerie etc but it’s not saying whatever it’s meant to be saying, clearly enough. This one gets an ‘interesting’ label.

It’s ok as an effort to begin to describe the close-up, organic landscape of bone...

Oh well I have to tear myself away now and go feed a starving husband....(they have a tendency to walk around like shadows from the Netherworld if their abdominal hour glass is empty...)