plan view map of the cave of Lascaux drawn by Mary
LASCAUX: Gold to airy thinness beat
Our
two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
-
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
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The color haunted me. In my memory, the area around Lascaux seemed to radiate a golden light - the soil, the ochre stone walls and buildings of the Dordogne, the caves.
John Donne's poem speaks of a love that surmounts all distances, even the distance of death. I transposed this to stand for the artist's spirit, spanning the distance of millennia. Gold, the most precious metal, keeps its flexibility and integrity even when stretched and beaten to an airy thinness. The art in the cave of Lascaux transmitted a luminous, enduring integrity to me - art that came full-born into the world, traversing vast arcs of time.
The cave itself is an exquisite shape, swelling and thinning like a living root, or a dancer on point. I felt as if I were inside a clay vessel whose inner edges were gyrating on a potter's wheel. The contours of the cave drawn in plan view prompted this series of ochre pigment drawings - Lascaux: gold to airy thinness beat.
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Lascaux Broadside, 2004 Limited editioned print with letterpress $175 framed (click image to enlarge)
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