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I am very interested in discovering how my aesthetic vision is tied to the efforts of hard-edged artists in the past, such as Kazimir Malevich and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, as well as the works by nameless artists of different epochs.  Recently, however, I have had cause to reconsider the notion of “past.”

Works of early artists of the genus Homo, have recently been discovered in two cave complexes in South Africa:  Blombas and Rising Star.  In the first, “artist toolkits” and geometric engravings in red ochre, below, have been reliably dated at 73,000 years BP.  In the Rising Star system, similar markings have been discovered on the walls of burial chambers of H. naledi (ca 240,000 years BP).  Paleo anthropologists have been staggered by these patterns of intersecting straight lines, appearing tens of thousands of years before figurative drawings of animals appeared on cave walls. 

The paintings in my solo exhibit, Past Times, come out of a long reflection on the breakthrough moments of higher order consciousness and visual organizing that resulted in those early markings.  

As I sat in my studio distilling and repeating the patterns of those First Artists, the idea of quilters’ and weavers’ “endless threads” came to mind…the repeated motions and materials of vast generations of individuals creating something functional, meaningful and visually satisfying.  How many individuals filled the span between the original mark makers and me?  How are we related?  Genetically?  Neurologically?  Spiritually?

I was reminded of the provocative first lines in noted art historian E.H. Gombrich’s text, The Story of Art (1959):  “There really is no such thing as Art.  There are only artists.”

An engraved red ochre block from the South African Blombas cave system,

reliably dated @ 73,000 years Before Present.