NEOLITHIC GAIA

What is it that makes a doodle become art, and how do you discern the difference? Can a much used image become an icon, and what turns a basic idea into an authentic expression?


 

 

The only way to answer that, is to experiment with it. Combining a paradoxical blend of spontaneous play with critical discernment, without the one inhibiting the other. It’s amazing how much preliminary calculation it takes to establish the foundation of where you want it to go, and even so, you can never be certain it will.

The more so since neither doodling nor art have the aim of being primarily rational or conforming to consensus or normal reality. Though, except by definition, when was consensus reality ever normal, as we seem to pretend?

Creativity can be imaginative and even innovative, and preferably not beyond our ability to influence its unfoldment in some way, consciously or otherwise, according to the original impulse or intent. Such freedom of play involves discipline, while simultaneously allowing what we tend to call chance.

So imagine when, as is often the case, that you initiate a process and find you’ve set yourself a puzzle as to how to resolve it to satisfaction and if it’s even possible. Play, whether in art or sport or anything else can seem as serious as we care to imagine it to be, and we have a tendency to engage in that game.

 

As if human activity as a whole consists in inviting exponentially ever more seemingly insoluble problems in order to grow out of having to do so. Compared to the infinitely perpetual folly of needless self-genocide and rampant environmental degradation, this tiny painting is but a momentary microscopic echo.

Whether potentially iconic or ironic, the genesis of this image comes out of musing on the possible alternatives to what we call ‘the human condition’.

Imagining an eternal fleeting moment in the Neolithic era, which when conceived with benevolent compassion probably wasn’t as ‘primitive’ as we’re persuaded to think. Having positive attributes we could naturally in retrospect lament the loss of. Since we seem to create bigger and not necessarily better problems, when you’d think the wisest way to solve all problems is by not creating them.

I spent a few hours carefully constructing and recreating this composition from an enlarged portion of a previous version called ‘Below the Mound’. There really are hills in Ireland, and elsewhere, shaped like this, naturally revered in honour of the Goddess Earth.

Here envisioned as if from a peaceful moment along the riverbank, on the way perhaps to visit neighbours. In Spring- time beyond memory and outside time. An imagined but certainly actual image as intimate antidote to all the predictable narratives of nothing but barbaric battles and struggles for survival so myopically presented as ‘history’. When it’s really been a long cyclic circular devolution from a forgotten and much higher state.

 

Seriously, and with not a shred of cynicism, who are we to talk of barbaric or civilized? Being totally enslaved to the artificial, and forgetting, disdaining, degrading the natural for the illusion of money. Resigned to as being the universal norm, even the inborn gift of imagination is lost.

Humans have been around for millions of years apparently, through many cycles of evolution and devolution. Solid evidence exists all around the planet, more often than not, intentionally concealed or confiscated, though currently being revealed.

In passing i recommend listening to presentations online by Claus Dona, as well as the series of videos on New Earth channel. As evidence that our history as taught is a lie. A lie being the consistent and deliberate concealment and falsification of what is self-evidently so.

A big subject, so rather than waste words in rant or lament, it’s something i find more harmoniously expressed in paint. The current approach shared here having nothing to do with art movements or styles in particular. Just the present play of imagination. An improvised process simultaneously healing the unacknowledged universally parasitic virus called ‘difference divides’. Difference arises mutually, obviously. Long live diversity.

 

This stark black web of defining contour lines. Three whole afternoons, evenings and through the night. Quietly infusing life and organic richness into the spaces of white. Modifying in fine-tuned detail till it was right. Integrating stitch by stitch like a tapestry, a unified whole. If it looks primitive and old, it is. Full of light and life. ~

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Martin Rainbowmaker.