Sacred Art/ Sacred Language

This has been a very difficult weekend, but it seems to be the best time to go public with a new body of artwork that I want to embark on.

I live in Western Colorado on the edge of the Ancients. If I head west or South, it is hard to not stumble upon some sign of an Ancient world. It has captivated me, spoken to me for years. Many years ago an elder adopted me, and when I asked him about the meaning of some petroglyphs I recently discovered, and he told me I already knew. What? I didn't have a clue what they meant, but he insisted I did. This planted a small seed within me that has been slowly germinating for years.

Walking through canyons and deserts I've come to realize that as much as I enjoy and appreciate the artistic value of all the petroglyphs and pictographs, they really are not art in the modern sense of the word. They are a language. They are the first written language upon this continent and all over the world.

I want to embark on a journey of new artwork where I try to rediscover within myself my own sacred language. My relatives come from France, and who knows, maybe they were one of the people that wrote upon the Lascaux caves. Maybe my Ancestors are whispering to my heart.

For whatever reason, I feel that this is important. I keep seeing images of unplugging a television from a wall with the words written above, "In order to reconnect, you must first disconnect."

Art has always been about communication I believe, but back then it was an actual language; just ask the Hopi. In the book Canyon Spirits, Florence Lister writes, "Some scholars argue that the rock are left on craggy canyon faces, the polychromatic murals painted on kiva walls, and the geometric and naturalistic patterns laid on ceramic vessels were a form of written language in being messages to the spirit world." Scientists aren't allowed to make creative leaps to understanding what is upon all the rocks in our region, but artists are not limited by those rules.

Art is about emotional expression or sharing a scene that we love. It is storytelling to some degree, but when you stand underneath a huge panel covered in images along the Colorado River, you know that something much deeper is going on. Archaeologists believes that only the shamans did the actual writing upon the rocks, at least among the Fremont People,

because they discovered pigments buried with the shamans. I believe writing was a sacred act. The power of an image can create or it can destroy.

Fritz Scholder was one of my favorite artists. He said that in this time we need more Shamanic artists. I believe he said this because he saw how disconnected we are becoming from Nature. Maybe this body of work will help some find their way back.