Greetings Readers ! It's been a while since I've updated you on my Blog. I've been hiking in the Scrub desert in Southwest Texas. There is a lot to say about this area and I will write soon about more wonderful rock art there that is thousands of years old. So in the meantime, here is one of my adventure posts. The original painting is sold but prints and cards are still available.
Southwest Texas,
Two hours on remote/ washed out and deeply rutted jeep roads in scrub country 15 miles from the Mexican border. Boulder outcroppings and shallow cave structures scattered through the harsh desert landscape A sunny November day.
We leave the jeep and hike 30 minutes to what seems to be a collection of large boulders and small caves. We enter a cave through a 4 foot opening into the darkness. The cave is about 6 ft in height at the tallest point. I lay on my back on the rocky floor of the cave and enter another dimension. The entire ceiling is black from thousands of years of habitation and smoke soot from fires. Carved and pecked into the black ceiling are supernatural images, animals, symbols, anthropomorphs and one 20 foot wandering centipede, or something that looks like a centipede. It's surreal. Since the cave had been occupied and used for thousands of years, there are various styles of art and some overlap. The centipede has been interpreted by some as the Milky Way. I can't imagine how the sky must have looked thousands of years ago with the Milky Way so bright as it reaches across the night sky.
I think about the hundreds of people that must have lived in and used that cave. Was it a ritual site? A stop along the route for some? A winter hide away?
This painting is my interpretation of how I felt when I was in the cave. It felt sacred and otherworldly to me, as if I entered another dimension.
We quietly stayed in the cave and took in the mystery of it all before exiting into the glaring sun of the desert .
It has been requested that I provide purchase information on the works in this blog. This original work is sold , however, prints and cards are available in Gallery 4, "If you love pictographs" The title is "Beneath Consciousness