IMELDA ALMQVIST ART: JOURNEYS TO INNER WORLDS, OTHER WORLDS AND AROUND THE WORLD IN PAINTINGS

Rock Art, cave paintings, pictograms, petroglyphs, Lascaux - France, labyrinths, Vitlycke - Tanumshede - Bohuslan - Sweden, Shamanism, access to Other Worlds, Mount Bego (Southern France), Camonica Valley (Northern Italy), sacred landscapes, indigenous people, vision quests, shamanic ritual, Master of Animals, Wandjina Spirit Beings, Paranamitee Style in Australian Aboriginal Rock Art, The Game Keeper, extinct animals, the Dreamtime, Creation Stories - Foundation Myths, footprint symbolism, Transition and Transformation, Scandinavian Spirit Ships, Upside Down Boats, the Cosmic Tree - World Tree - Sacred Trees, Nasca Lines - Nasca Monkey, ceremonial walking, the Cosmic Egg, Rapanui - Easter Island - Birdman God 'Make Make', fertility, sexuality, twins and twinning, twin petroglyphs

ROCK ART AT TANUMSHEDE IN SWEDEN #1

Photograph by the author, May 2006

ROCK ART

cave paintings - pictograms - petroglyphs

Art outlives governments, creeds, societies, even civilisations. Art is what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

- Katherine Anne Porter

Modern man understands a painting when it reproduces what the eye sees, whereas symbolic - prehistoric - man understands a painting when it expresses what is known to his mind

G.H. Luquet (1930)

 8 Small canvasses inspired by Rock Art in the American South West

 £175 for set of 8

My first introduction to Rock Art was while studying Art History in Amsterdam. We had a brief look at the cave paintings of Lascaux (in France) as an example of one of the earliest forms of painting and human beings producing art. We soon moved on to subjects the course spent far more time on, like Renaissance Art, Gothic Cathedrals and so forth.

My second introduction to Rock Art was in Sweden last year. I was painting and researching labyrinths as vehicles for spiritual or inner journeys and I was very keen to visit, and walk!, a real one. We visited a labyrinth called 'Trelleborg's Slott' on the Swedish west coast. As we were in the area, we also paid a visit to the rock art in Vitlycke and Tanumshede.

SUN?!

I came across this mossy yellow shape on a big rock on the Islas de Cies, islands off the North West coast of Spain, while sailing during the summer of 2007. It seemed to illustrate how people might have started carving in rocks, possibly drawing on what already seemed to be there in terms of shapes suggested by cracks or moss!

Unlike the slide show in the lecture hall 20 year earlier, the images at Tanumshede really spoke to me. It seemed incredible that they were carved many centuries ago, and yet look so fresh and 'evocative'. It is almost like entering a time travel machine: an instant transfer across the ages to a very different era! (The petroglyphs at Tanumshede have been painted a bright red, presumably to make it easier for visitors to make out the images. Not everyone agrees with this approach. One certainly needs to remember that they weren't painted that colour by the people who carved them!)

ROCK ART AT TANUMSHEDE #2

 By now I have read a lot about Rock Art. Personally I find it more fascinating than Renaissance Art or Gothic cathedrals! It is found all over the world, often in caves, but also in less secluded places.

When you start reading about Rock Art, you soon come across the phenomenon of Shamanism. According to traditions found all over the world, shamans acted as a link between humans and another dimension, or Other World and supernatural powers.

PETROGLYPHS DEPICTING SHAMANS OR SHAMANIC FIGURES

Inspired by Rock Art in the American South West    (SOLD)

Access points to the Otherworld include liminal ('edgy') places such as estuaries, rapids, caves, islands and so forth. Sacrificial sites are often found in such edgy places. Rock Art sites such as Mount Bego (Southern France) or Camonica Valley (Northern Italy) are at the edge of the settled landscape, in a cleft within the mountains.There is a lot to be learned about sacred landscapes by listening to indigenous people and knowledge.

LABYRINTH FACE  £95

Painting inspired by Rock Art in Chamonica (Northern Italy)

The Native American people of Northern America tell us how people who were about to become shamans went on vision quests, where through isolation and fasting they entered a trance state and met a guardian spirit. Shamans sought out lonely sites for gaining contact with the spirit world and sacred knowledge. At times these Native American shamans might use red ochre to create rock art in order to create an image of the vision received. That way a natural place became a place of transcendental significance.

VISION SERPENT   (80 x 100 cm)   £625

Caves, fissures and cracks in rocks were considered especially important because they served as access routes for spirits and a place for offerings to be left. Field study of such sites shows that they have natural acoustic properties (the whistling of wind, the lapping of waves) that were of great importance and addded to the drumming, chanting, singing and using rattles of shamanic ritual.

THE MASTER OF ANIMALS   (SOLD)

painting inspired by Rock Art in the American South West

ELK DREAMERS SOCIETY    £225

ANCESTOR CAVE DREAMING £225

BACK TO THE WOMB OF MOTHER EARTH £225

What touches me so deeply about art that was, in some cases, made some 30,000 years ago, Prehistoric Art? Maybe because it was art that was made by our ancestors in direct response to consciousness, an awareness of being and being human. After all, though bears have been known to leave deep scratch marks in caves (and indeed over rock art), animals don't produce art. Animals don't develop religion either, but humans do. Some anthropologists claim that art was born at the same time as religion in the mind of 'anatomically modern human beings'. A scientist who studies the human brain (called David Lewis Williams) claims that Neanderthal people were unable to remember their dreams and talk about them and similarly their brain had not been wired for art & religion. They were what he calls 'Congenital Atheists'.

JOURNEY £225

BEAR SPIRIT AND DEER SPIRIT £195

WHALES £195

WANDJINA SPIRIT BEING

Painting inspired by Australian Aboriginal Rock Art

In one book listed below ('Prehistoric Art') I read an account of how a group of Ngarinyin Aboriginal people were taken from their tribal lands in Australia for the first time to Europe. They were surprised but relatively unaffected by the radical change of setting. However, they were then taken in to the Lascaux Cave in southwestern France and they began to weep. While not recognising exactly what they saw there, they believed that their sacred painted sites had crossed the world to meet them. They had discovered a context and cosmogonic approach very close to their own. They recognised the vital force, the symbiosis between mankind and nature. I find this account deeply moving.

(Here is a hyperlink for more information about Australian Aboriginal thinking and Art).

PAIR

Painting inspired by rock art in the American South West

 Another fascinating thing about Australian Aboriginal people is that their use of images and symbolism has hardly changed over thousands of years. There is one style, the so called Paranamitee style, which is found all over Australia and even in Tasmania, that is so familiar to today's Aboriginal people, that they can 'read it' as if it were a form of writing: a circle with dots is a group of people in search of food, the trident is an emu-footprint and the equivalent of woman while a line with two double barbs stands for an initiated male...

THE GAME KEEPER £245

painting inspired by Rock Art in the American South West

Animals that have been extinct for 15, 000 years or more appear in rock art. For the Aboriginal people the images of these vanished cretures from the Dreamtime preserve the magic power of those animals until today.

PREGNANT BIGHORN

Painting inspired by Rock Art from the American South West

All over the world, images of animals appear, but also mythical unearthly creatures that are half human and half animal. These figures form a direct link to a society's creation myths and spiritual beliefs. (Please use this hyperlink to visit the page about Creation Stories from all over the world).

EARTH MOTHER BIRD

painting inspired by Rock Art in the American South West

Bird symbolism was important in Shamanism. It expressed the symbolism of a magical 'soul flight' to other dimensions or an Other World

For Native American peoples, the same holds true: their ancient mythologies cast light on certain Rock Art images and representations. For the Algonquin, for instance, a turtle surrounded by cup shapes stands for clan fertility, the eagle symbolises lightning and absolute power and quadruped footprints suggest 'that which cannot be seen'! (It would be impossible to interpret this if we didn't have mythology to guide us).

EARTH FATHER

Painting inspired by Rock Art from the American South West

In South America human footprints in Rock Art can indicate the presence of human beings, or more indirectly, the creation of (hu)mankind.

Footprints are an ubiquitous motif, they appear all over the world. In the province of Uppland in Sweden we find a set of footprints carved deliberately over a vein of quartz in a rock, making them luminescent. This could point to hidden power, i.e. they might symbolise a person's journey through the rock to an Other World. They might point to the living: to transition and transformation. They might equally represent the dead crossing over between worlds.

MYSTERIOUS COUPLE £185 for set of 2

Two companion paintings inspired by mysterious bird-head figures found in Rock Art in the USA

It might be worth mentioning here that there is an Indian Jain tradition of carving footprints on stone plaques set up in sacred places to commemmorate those who starve themselves to death as sacrificial offerings.

Another interesting fact is that in the Bohuslan region on the Swedish west coast, there are also animals footprints (paw prints and cloven hooves) in rock art. Maybe animals were crossing between worlds or disappering into the rock face as well?!

FERTILITY

Painting inspired by Rock Art in the American South West

As we are in Scandinavia and on the subject of crossings: on the Swedish west coast (in Vitlycke and Tanumshede) we find many boats 'sailing across' rock faces as though on the sea. A stiking feature is that some are definitely ships, but other images are more shed-like. Some seem deliberately ambigous: they could be either, or both at the same time. These could mark the seasons of the year (summer and and the snow and ice of winter) or they could be metaphors for life and death. Light worlds and dark worlds, this world and other worlds. The last interpretation is suggested by so called 'Upside Down Boats'. These are carved very deeply, which means that they must be significant.

To read more about the shamanic concept of the Spirit Boat or Spirit Canoe, please use this hyperlink to the SHAMANISM PAGE.

SPIRIT SHIPS £185

Inspired by ships found in Rock Art on the Swedish West Coast (Bohuslan)

ROCK ART IN TANUMSHEDE, SWEDEN, #3

Photograph by Imelda Almqvist, May 2006

The 'upside down' or 'backwards' symbolism is found in other parts of the world as well as in the Nordic region. The Saami people of Lapland believe that the underworld is an inversion of the earth-world, and vice versa. 'The dead walk upside down in the footsteps of the living'. Just as for the Sora of Orissa, in Eastern India, the seasons in the underworld are inverted and the dead speak backwards.  On the page about Siberia you can read more about shamans and the importance of footwear for Aboriginal Siberian people. They believed that footwear was very important because it literally touched down on the dividing line between our world and the Other World.

FOOTPRINTS £215

painting inspired by Rock Art in Tanumshede, Sweden

Many of these rock art images might never reveal their meaning. We can but guess. Here is a painting inspired by a very unusual petroglyph from Litslena in Uppland, Sweden.

ANTLERED HUMAN BEING ON SPIRIT BOAT OR SLED    £95

This is an 'Antlered Human Being on a Spirit Boat or Sled'. It is very likely that this image depicts a shamanic journey to the Other World, as opposed to a mainstream journey in the Everyday World. Here is another curious image:

COSMIC TREE or WORLD TREE £95

This rock carving seems to depict an antlered human being perched on top of a tree. Or is it a shaman dressed in animal spirit guide costume climbing the Cosmic Tree to the Other World? Many of these images carved in rock might never give up their mystery. We can look at them and listen to what our mind tells us.

TREE OF LIFE ANTLERS

Painting inspired by Rock Art from Scandinavia

LABYRINTH PEOPLE I & II   (BOTH SOLD)

And that is enough about Scandinavia for now. On to a very different continent: South America!

THE 'NASCA MONKEY'

Ceramic design, part of a series based on the Nasca Lines

by Imelda Almqvist in Zapallal, Peru, 1998

On the subject of petroglyphs and South America, of course the Nasca Lines in Peru should be mentioned. Huge animal (and geometrical) shapes were carved out in the desert by digging a ditch that exposed the white rock beneath black soil. These figures are so immense that they can only be seen in their totality and their shapes recognised by going up in an airplane and flying over them. There have been wild theories as to their use and meaning, but most recently the thinking is that these figures were used as paths for ceremonial walking.

THE COSMIC EGG £155

A painting inspired by Make Make, the 'Bird God' of Easter Island

Rapanui (formerly known as Easter Island) is home to many drawings of fish and birds engraved on slabs and blocks of basalt. There are hundreds of petroglyphs portraying the 'Birdman' Creator God 'Make Make'.

COSMOGONIC MYTH LABYRINTH £195

Painting inspired by Rock Art from the American Southwest

One concept that hasn't had a mention yet on this page is 'fertility'. Fertility is one of the big themes in rock art of prehistoric cultures all over the world, particularly so in the American Southwest. Modern scholars find rock art imagery embarrassing because of its blatant depictions of sexuality. However, in Native American societies sexuality wasn't only about reproduction and it wasn't necessarily restricted by marriage. It was thought to be a gift from the spirit world. It is also possible that some images of coupling depict fertility rituals such as the Sacred Marriage, where participants act out the parts of god and goddess in a mystical union to sustain life. (See the book 'The Serpent and the Sacred Fire' for more detailed information about rock art and fertility).

PRIMORDIAL TWINS £155

In the same region we find a lot of twin symbolism. Twins play a major role in creation stories and mythologies from all over the world. There are twins of light and darkness, Hero Twins and Warrior Twins and so forth. (Use this hyperlink to read more about Twins and Twinning).

TWIN PETROGLYPHS, Rock Art Series £155

based on petroglyphs of twins in rock art in the USA

One interesting aspect of twins is the notion that twins were originally united in the womb, but forced apart at birth. Therefore they belong together and should ultimately be reunited. Essentially they constitute a single person together. In this sense they have come to represent the two sides of human nature, pairs such as masculine/femnine, introvert/extrovert and so forth.

TWIN PETROGLYPHS (30 X 30 cm)   £145

Painting inspired by Anasazi petroglyphs from New Mexico, depiciting aspects of twins and 'opposite nature'

Other figures that make a frequent appearance in Southwest American rock art are the flute player and trickster, other humpbacked creatures, snakes (it seems that every mythology has its own serpent!) and spirals, butterflies and dragonflies, cloud terraces... The inventory is endless.

I don't think that this is the end of paintings inspired by Rock Art. Rock Art is art made by the first humans, it takes us right back to the cradle of human life as we know it. It has the power to move us and touch us even today, tens of thousands of years after it was made.

It would seem that a zoomorphic age (i.e. an age where concepts took the shape of animals, IAB) preceded the antropomorphic (a period where concepts took the shape of human beings, IAB) period dominated by "God become Man". The universe of prehistoric art belongs mainly to the first period, as that of ancient Egypt continued to, the animal being at the root of powerful religious urges in a world still close to untamed nature'

Jean Pierre Mohen, Prehistoric Art, 2002

Imelda Almqvist   (Last updated September 2010)

GOAT WITH SPIRAL HORNS

DUCKHEAD COUPLE

Painting inspired by Rock Art from the American South West

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prehistoric Art - The Mythical Birth of Humanity, Jean Pierre Mohen, PIERRE TERRAIL, Paris, 2002  ISBN  2-87939-233-0

THE SERPENT AND THE SACRED FIRE, Fertility Images in Southwest Rock Art, Dennis Slifer, 2000, MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, Santa Fe, ISBN  0-89013-347-6

THE QUEST FOR THE SHAMAN, Miranda and Stephen Aldhouse Green, Thames and Hudson, UK, 2005  ISBN  0-500-05134-8

 STORIED STONE, Indian Rock Art of the Black Hills Country, Linea Sundstrom, University of Oklahoma Press, 2004,  ISBN 0-8061-3596-4

Guide to INDIAN ROCK CARVINGS of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Beth Hill, 1993, Hancock House, ISBN 0-919654-34-7

ROCK CARVINGS IN NORWAY, Anders Hagen, 1965, Tanum Forlag, Oslo

TANUMSHEDE ROCK ART

Photograph by Imelda Almqvist, May 2006

Rock Art, cave paintings, pictograms, petroglyphs, Lascaux - France, labyrinths, Vitlycke - Tanumshede - Bohuslan - Sweden, Shamanism, access to Other Worlds, Mount Bego (Southern France), Camonica Valley (Northern Italy), sacred landscapes, indigenous people, vision quests, shamanic ritual, Master of Animals, Wandjina Spirit Beings, Paranamitee Style in Australian Aboriginal Rock Art, The Game Keeper, extinct animals, the Dreamtime, Creation Stories - Foundation Myths, footprint symbolism, Transition and Transformation, Scandinavian Spirit Ships, Upside Down Boats, the Cosmic Tree - World Tree - Sacred Trees, Nasca Lines - Nasca Monkey, ceremonial walking, the Cosmic Egg, Rapanui - Easter Island - Birdman God 'Make Make', fertility, sexuality, twins and twinning, twin petroglyphs

IMELDA ALMQVIST ART: JOURNEYS TO INNER WORLDS, OTHER WORLDS AND AROUND THE WORLD IN PAINTINGS