The Art of Making Marks
By: Kim McElroy
“(Prehistoric) People didn’t one day invent making pictures. What happened was that people were familiar with the images that their brains were producing which were being projected onto cave walls and ceilings. And they wanted to nail down and make permanent those images, those visions that they saw.”
David Lewis-Williams
David Lewis-Williams
Master's Peace
Our species has been making marks for eons. Long before we had language or written communication, we had drawings and symbols. It is in our DNA to make marks.
I was born loving horses, and from the moment I could hold a crayon and make any marks that were recognizable, I was drawing them. I always knew I’d be an artist, but somewhere along the way, I lost touch with drawing horses. Then, in my early twenties, horses and art once again intersected, and I’ve been painting them ever since. The drawings that first sparked this creative epiphany happened when I was in the presence of horses running free, and those drawings looked different than any art I had created of horses before; they looked like cave paintings.
WHY HORSES?
Cézanne once said that it was the artist’s task to become concentric with nature. Horses taught me what this means. The epiphany that occurred to me when I began drawing horses again was one that I also return to time and again, which is to seek answers to the question, “Why Horses?” This question has prompted me to go beyond pursuing my creative impulses to devising techniques to inspire them in others.
Horses are catalysts for the human creative impulse. I believe this is because we have an evolutionary and intuitive kinship with horses that inspires us. Horses communicate with each other in mysterious ways that arouses our curiosity about subtle forms of expression. Art is one of these forms. In their beauty and their ways of expressing their emotions through their body language, horses seem to tap into the non-verbal part of us that also happens to be the place from which art emerges; a place where we leave our linear verbal brain behind and begin to think in pictures.
It is human nature to want to record thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But in our culture, drawing is relegated to a skill that you are born with, or you aren’t. That issue becomes irrelevant when we consider how long humans have been compelled to create. We knew that Homo Sapiens created what we commonly refer to as cave paintings. But recent findings have proven that even our more “primitive” relatives, the Neanderthals who existed over 64,000 years ago, were also creating drawings of abstract symbolic concepts, and human and animal images.
These drawings, made on the only “canvas” that was available in nature, took planning, thought, and time, and held deep importance for the creators and for the people who continue to experience them. The Horse accompanied us then, as they do now. In the book “The Horse – The Epic History of Our Noble Companion,” Wendy Williams writes about early paleolithic art saying, “Horses are the most frequently represented animal in the twenty-thousand-year period that preceded the advent of farming and what we call civilization. “
Scientists still debate about the meanings of cave paintings, and whether they had ritualistic or religious symbolism. When I read about cave paintings in Carl Jung’s 1964 book “Man and his Symbols”, I resonated with the words of Jung’s associate, Aniela Jaffé, when she wrote, “The [cave] drawings express a form of sympathetic magic which is based on the reality of a double represented in the drawing. This means that the paleolithic peoples held a strong sense of identification between a living being and its image, which was considered to be the being’s soul.”
Horses preceded us in evolution by millions of years. It seems they have a lot to say – or express – about what is relevant today. Horses have an intrinsic ability to affect us on many levels. If we allow our state of mind to become quiet in the presence of horses, we have access to more information.
Emulating the qualities of the right or creative side of our brain, horses are non-verbal and perceptual. They are also intuitive, non-temporal, and spatial, and they perceive through synthesis rather than analysis. When we reclaim the choice to use our right brain, to release the human need to talk or even think in words, we can emulate the horse by perceiving, holistically, our inner and outer states of mind.
Horses seek relationship and to unify their relationships and their environments. With their guidance, we can learn to relate to everything in the sphere of our inquiry as it exists in relationship, rather than in isolation. When there is relationship, there is synchronicity, and that is a necessary aspect of inspiration.
I can imagine what it must have been like for our ancestors entering those caves for the first time and seeing the dancing fire of flickering torches casting shadows on the walls. Shadows that often looked like animals. The womb-like cave atmosphere in and of itself must have evoked the meditative and visionary experiences that naturally precede the desire to create.
I was born loving horses, and from the moment I could hold a crayon and make any marks that were recognizable, I was drawing them. I always knew I’d be an artist, but somewhere along the way, I lost touch with drawing horses. Then, in my early twenties, horses and art once again intersected, and I’ve been painting them ever since. The drawings that first sparked this creative epiphany happened when I was in the presence of horses running free, and those drawings looked different than any art I had created of horses before; they looked like cave paintings.
WHY HORSES?
Cézanne once said that it was the artist’s task to become concentric with nature. Horses taught me what this means. The epiphany that occurred to me when I began drawing horses again was one that I also return to time and again, which is to seek answers to the question, “Why Horses?” This question has prompted me to go beyond pursuing my creative impulses to devising techniques to inspire them in others.
Horses are catalysts for the human creative impulse. I believe this is because we have an evolutionary and intuitive kinship with horses that inspires us. Horses communicate with each other in mysterious ways that arouses our curiosity about subtle forms of expression. Art is one of these forms. In their beauty and their ways of expressing their emotions through their body language, horses seem to tap into the non-verbal part of us that also happens to be the place from which art emerges; a place where we leave our linear verbal brain behind and begin to think in pictures.
It is human nature to want to record thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But in our culture, drawing is relegated to a skill that you are born with, or you aren’t. That issue becomes irrelevant when we consider how long humans have been compelled to create. We knew that Homo Sapiens created what we commonly refer to as cave paintings. But recent findings have proven that even our more “primitive” relatives, the Neanderthals who existed over 64,000 years ago, were also creating drawings of abstract symbolic concepts, and human and animal images.
These drawings, made on the only “canvas” that was available in nature, took planning, thought, and time, and held deep importance for the creators and for the people who continue to experience them. The Horse accompanied us then, as they do now. In the book “The Horse – The Epic History of Our Noble Companion,” Wendy Williams writes about early paleolithic art saying, “Horses are the most frequently represented animal in the twenty-thousand-year period that preceded the advent of farming and what we call civilization. “
Scientists still debate about the meanings of cave paintings, and whether they had ritualistic or religious symbolism. When I read about cave paintings in Carl Jung’s 1964 book “Man and his Symbols”, I resonated with the words of Jung’s associate, Aniela Jaffé, when she wrote, “The [cave] drawings express a form of sympathetic magic which is based on the reality of a double represented in the drawing. This means that the paleolithic peoples held a strong sense of identification between a living being and its image, which was considered to be the being’s soul.”
Horses preceded us in evolution by millions of years. It seems they have a lot to say – or express – about what is relevant today. Horses have an intrinsic ability to affect us on many levels. If we allow our state of mind to become quiet in the presence of horses, we have access to more information.
Emulating the qualities of the right or creative side of our brain, horses are non-verbal and perceptual. They are also intuitive, non-temporal, and spatial, and they perceive through synthesis rather than analysis. When we reclaim the choice to use our right brain, to release the human need to talk or even think in words, we can emulate the horse by perceiving, holistically, our inner and outer states of mind.
Horses seek relationship and to unify their relationships and their environments. With their guidance, we can learn to relate to everything in the sphere of our inquiry as it exists in relationship, rather than in isolation. When there is relationship, there is synchronicity, and that is a necessary aspect of inspiration.
I can imagine what it must have been like for our ancestors entering those caves for the first time and seeing the dancing fire of flickering torches casting shadows on the walls. Shadows that often looked like animals. The womb-like cave atmosphere in and of itself must have evoked the meditative and visionary experiences that naturally precede the desire to create.
RECORDING
It is natural for us to want to record the fleeting experiential images that pass through our minds as meaning and metaphor, or that come and go or across the screen behind our closed eyes. If we go back to the beginning, back to holding a tool, and record a feeling or thought as some form of artistic expression, we can tap into the ancient experience of making marks.
I learned early on in my art, that what I was drawing wasn’t the form of the horse, but rather its energy. Just like in the fine art of Sumi painting. Sumi artists spend a lifetime learning to create a perfect line. They believe that the line conveys the Chi - or primal life energy of the subject. As an artist, making marks is a process of trusting that one’s intent, combined with the flow of the energy or Chi, will create a work of art that will convey an experience of the subject’s power.
Once while I was attending an equine experiential workshop, I joined a group of three women and entered a horse paddock with three horses. We were instructed to act as a human herd and see how the horses would interact with us. Two of the horses were curious and friendly, but one mare was particularly aloof. I tried to figure out what I, as one of her human herd members, could offer her in her perfectly natural world that would be interesting to her. So, instinctively, I picked up a stick and started drawing swirls and lines in the dirt. Suddenly I felt the presence of the mare close behind me. She had her head low to the ground and was clearly riveted by what I was doing. Somehow my focus and intent made me interesting.
What's even more intriguing is that later, I watched her pick up a stick, and it seemed to me that she wanted to draw lines in the dirt too.
It is natural for us to want to record the fleeting experiential images that pass through our minds as meaning and metaphor, or that come and go or across the screen behind our closed eyes. If we go back to the beginning, back to holding a tool, and record a feeling or thought as some form of artistic expression, we can tap into the ancient experience of making marks.
I learned early on in my art, that what I was drawing wasn’t the form of the horse, but rather its energy. Just like in the fine art of Sumi painting. Sumi artists spend a lifetime learning to create a perfect line. They believe that the line conveys the Chi - or primal life energy of the subject. As an artist, making marks is a process of trusting that one’s intent, combined with the flow of the energy or Chi, will create a work of art that will convey an experience of the subject’s power.
Once while I was attending an equine experiential workshop, I joined a group of three women and entered a horse paddock with three horses. We were instructed to act as a human herd and see how the horses would interact with us. Two of the horses were curious and friendly, but one mare was particularly aloof. I tried to figure out what I, as one of her human herd members, could offer her in her perfectly natural world that would be interesting to her. So, instinctively, I picked up a stick and started drawing swirls and lines in the dirt. Suddenly I felt the presence of the mare close behind me. She had her head low to the ground and was clearly riveted by what I was doing. Somehow my focus and intent made me interesting.
What's even more intriguing is that later, I watched her pick up a stick, and it seemed to me that she wanted to draw lines in the dirt too.
Before we bridled and domesticated horses, they provided humanity with inspiration that was of such profound importance that the drawings they inspired continue to touch us, and teach us, tens of thousands of years later. Now that humankind itself has become bridled and domesticated, through our unique ability to make marks, horses can help offer us a way back to nature, back to our inner nature, and the canvas of our spirit. ~*~
