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.
This painting, “The Dreaming” is a reflection on our belonging here on Earth. I traveled a deep time tunnel to meet bison in the caves, painted by an ancestor in firelight, and felt the bison cave painting come to life and begin a journey into the unknown. During ice ages our planet shape-shifts, land bridges form and migrations become possible. It is thought that this is how both bison and humans came into North America. Water turned to ice and pulled back, exposing a land bridge of 500 miles between what we have named Siberia and Alaska. The bison came across first—between 195,000-135,000 years ago. Humans possibly crossed the bridge 15,000 years ago, walking into a land filled with mystery and mega-fauna, of wooly mammoths and scimitar cats and dire wolves. We followed the land and free running water, hunting animals and gathering plants and spreading into territories which had never been depressed by human feet.
In this moment, there is a deep polarization between human beings and Earth. This is my deepest grief. I have always felt I belonged as an Earth creature and yet, as I experience my human world, I feel the discouragement that our species made a devastating turn at a crucial cross-road. Traveling down the time tunnel in paint and imagination has helped, tingling the ancestral taproot of belonging. This painting is a prayer that we continue to imagine, to dance in firelight with the animals, and to cross the threshold in the spiral of time and find ourselves home.