Art is as old as time itself.
From the moment the first human picked up a stone to scratch a jagged pattern onto a cave wall, or a stick to etch an image in the dirt, creating art has been a part of what makes us human. And yet, that very creation presupposes art’s own pre-existence: that there are things found in Nature of such great beauty and significance that humans must try to reduce a facsimile of them to something touchable, reachable.
Nature creates her own art every day.
Its something that seems to be hard-wired into us, the desire to duplicate what we see and experience, to transfer it to a surface where we can continue to look at it, to be reminded of it, and where others can share our experiences vicariously. It’s something that arises in childhood, and for our generation, it perhaps most often took the form of pencils and pens and crayons on paper. [As adults, for those of us not artists by profession, it may be pen on paper — or now, more accurately, pixels on a screen — to draw pictures by way of patterns we call letters, making bigger patterns called words, strung together to create large sequential virtual images.] But that urge to set the image in the stone is strong, and it’s why so many of us spent long hours with colored chalk on our sidewalks and streets (or, in my case, with mechanic’s chalk on the cement floor of my father’s auto repair garage).
We’re following in the footsteps of our ancestors, doing what we’re hard-wired to do.
The photo above is one Wings took eight or ten years ago, part of a series he took of the petroglyphs (literally, “rock writing”) at San Cristóbal, not far from here.New Mexico is blessed with an abundant of petroglyphs, of a written record by the Ancient Ones; the greater challenge is protecting them from vandalism, whether in the form of graffiti or of commercial development.
Perhaps the most famous is the Petroglyphs National Monument, on the edge of Albuquerque’s West Mesa. It is home to some 24,000 rock-art images, some thousands of years old, and a historical record that depends on the context of place. A few years ago, the City of Albuquerque succeeded in destroying a chunk of this historical record, “relocating” the “rocks” and razing part of it to push through a four-lane bypass for ease of travel by the influx of new (and wealthy, and disproportionately politically powerful) information technology professional class. Tribal nations were aghast and fought back hard, but neither the project’s backers nor the City were capable of shame, much less any sense of historical value. The bypass went through, and went straight through the site, and now a large portion of the historical record (on land sacred to peoples still living in the area today) has been ripped from its necessary context, bulldozed, paved over, painted over. Gone.
These photos were taken at a site much nearer, one that is currently fairly well maintained. Wings has numerous photos; these were two I already had scanned into digital format for posting. This one I find especially interesting, because of what it seems to me to portray: The large circle is edged by fifty-two spokes. (Yes, I counted them.) Inside the circle is what appears to be flowing arrow, point to the right — clockwise. The way of the sun. He called the photo The Cycle of the Sun — 52 Weeks.
It’s reminiscent of a photo I took myself, more than a decade ago, at another such site: Three Rivers Petroglyphs, in the southern part of the state. Despite its significantly lower elevation, the area is wild and beautiful, with sun and shadows creating their own art amidst the walls and faces of the hoodoo-like cliffs, in a twilit palette of blues and purples and golds.
It was the only landscape photo I got that day of the larger area. Most of my shots were devoted to the glyphs themselves, and the stories they told, if only we were attentive enough and perceptive enough to hear and understand.
Some of the imagery was, of course, recognizeable, even much more than a thousand years later: a turtle, birds, insects, human forms. Some was less easily interpreted, but I spent hours poring over the images, seeking to understand what they were trying to say. My favorite was always this one:
I called it The Sun Society, for the twenty-four spokes that edge the inner hoop, itself bisected twice to point to the Four Directions. My best guess was at a symbol for the cycle of the sun over the course of a day. Whether it meant that or something entirely different to the artist, it’s useful to me as a reminder of the cyclical nature of all things.
Which brings me to today’s featured piece, one that has been speaking to me for days, as though it’s begging to be shown. I had already intended, over the next few days, to focus this section on the role of earth in art: actual earth, soil and clay, and on the imagery associated with it specific to this place. But looking at it again, really seeing it, brought up memories of other pictures in stone, and of stones that are themselves pictures.
From the cuff’s description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Rich brown and gray tones limned in deep reds evoke the desert’s stark, rugged sandstone canyons in the large oval picture jasper cabochon that forms the centerpiece of this striking cuff. Dual strands of heavy triangle wire support the stone, which rests in a sawtooth bezel.
Sterling silver; picture jasper
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
As noted in the description, the stone in the cuff is called “picture jasper,” one of many, many forms of jasper used by jewelers and smiths to make stunning natural-stone wearable art. It’s popular with Native artists, both for its raw, bold natural beauty and for its relative affordability, compared to stones in the so-called “gem class.”
Jasper is a mineral in the quartz class; specifically, it’s a form of chalcedony. It is related to chert, a type of stone used by peoples ancient and not so ancient for knapping blades for use in tools and weapons.
Chert appears in plain form: an opaque substance with fairly uniform color, usually in a whitish, gray, or beige shade; it’s the sort of surface that one would tend to refer to as a “rock,” rather than a “stone.”
In its more colorful and variegated form, however, the same stone is known as “jasper,” and it comes in a dizzying array of patterns and hues. The most common shades range through the yellow-to-orange-to-red-to-brown section of the spectrum, followed by those in greenish shades of varying intensity (or lack thereof). Blues are more rare — rare in the sense that they are seldom found, not especially rare in terms of monetary value. Jasper also often appears with bold decorative patterns that occur naturally in the stone: spots and splotches; agate-like bands and plumes; matrices that create the appearance of landscape “pictures”; even dendrites, tiny fossilized once-living creatures. If you have a colorful banded or plumed stone and wondering whether it’s jasper or agate, hold it up to the light: If it’s translucent, it’s agate; if opaque, it’s jasper.
Jasper that is used in gemwork is stunningly diverse. Common varieties include bloodstone, a green so deep it is sometimes nearly blue, with a brick-red matrix that often appears in a drop-like pattern, hence the name; seafoam jasper, that usually appears in white or pastel shades, with round, puffy inclusions in a variety of colors that evoke the foam upon waves; and picture jasper, which is exactly what its name implies — a stone of wildly variable colors and matrices that appear to create their own picture, usually resembling a landscape.
Wings works with all of these and more. Several years ago, he made a beautiful oval solitaire out of a perfect bloodstone jasper cabochon — deep forest green, spotted with brilliant blood-red drops. A few years later, he made a commissioned piece, part of his Mona Lisa on the Rio Grande signature series, with a huge bloodstone oval like one I’ve never seen before: a deep teal with so much of the blue end of the spectrum present that at first look, it appeared midnight blue; the red matrix was actually darker than blood, and manifested in mysterious faint swirls.
But perhaps the most conducive to Indian jewelry, particularly Southwest-style Indian jewelry, is picture jasper. The stonescapes are rugged, bold, larger than life, often in the colors of the desert, and sometimes even of its lines, as well. The cuff above is a perfect example, although it was photographed in a way that I regard as upside-down: It has always looked, to me, like nothing so much as a late-summer sky awaiting a monsoonal storm to wet the dry, sandy red-rock canyon below. If you’ve ever traveled to the canyon country of the Four Corners Region, you know that the sandstone cliffs an outcroppings appear just as those in the stone — golden in hue, warmed daily by the sun, yet edged here and there in blood-red accents, particularly at dawn and twilight.
And the memories of these cliffs evoke yet older memories for me, of the pictures in stone of my own family’s part of Indian Country, our Pictured Rocks:
Only the briefest of glimpses of color and form here, but an intensely beautiful one. The colors span the whole spectrum, including greens and blues and purples. the interplay of water and light create a natural artistry I’ve never seen duplicated anywhere else. And they’re only one small part of the lands our people call home, lands that likewise include human petroglyph art in other areas.
Maybe this is why I’m so drawn to the cuff above, despite knowing that it’s not meant for me. It’s the artistry of sand and soil, of earth and air and water and light, of Nature herself, midwifed by Wings and swaddled in a silver embrace.
It’s memories, as old as time.
Somewhere, someone needs to be reminded of those same sorts of memories, needs the grounding they can provide, the reminder of Nature’s own art. When that person and the cuff find each other, both will be very lucky indeed.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
