Mark Making

The base of a drawing of marks representing jewelry art

I am ready a great book on Southwest pictographs and petrologist of the southwest region/four corners. “TRACING TIME: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau” by Craig Childs. And this, like my previous post, keeps me thinking about mark making and what it means to cultures, civilizations, and artists. His book is an interesting take on the “rock art” as he comes to it from observing local tribes observations to cultural anthropologists to laymen’s opinions. Depending on your background and culture, you would see ancestral maps and stories, or imagery on rocks created in the past. Many of these areas have layers of time painted or pecked into the rock over older pieces.

Art is like that too. We each bring our cultural and theoretical ideas to the table and we make marks. Some are “happy accidents” that lead to a new language that is used in a painting or piece of art or music. Others are made over and over with slight variations depending on time.

In the piece above stems from the need to make marks, forget time and space, and just get lost. Sometimes it opens the portal to the “flow state”, or taps into a deep curiosity to see what becomes of this micro to macro process, and sometimes it is just tracing time.

~onwards

beth ortman