The people who painted the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux used their hands. I guessed this was the case but it was only today that I saw an image of a hand on the wall, a hand with a crooked finger. the shape of a hand in the red ochre that is the planet’s first paint. There are whole walls of these handprints, which I didn’t know before, but this was an image of a single one.
The image of this hand in the pages of a book in a bookshop seemed to touch me across an amount of years I cannot even conceive of, and trying to conceive of it makes me feel as if I’m tipping my head back and looking at the night sky and actually allowing myself to look at it with my whole brain, and to feel that it isn’t a thing that takes place in my world and I am looking at, but the amniotic fluid that I’m swimming in, and I’m just a few cells in it, and I am something that takes place amidst it like the tiniest ripple of a wave in a massive, massive ocean.
I felt a bit like that in the bookshop and the image of that hand almost moved me to tears. It moved the tears in me.
It felt so close because I also paint with my hands, I also leave those red marks, I also use a lot of red, i also make marks on actual walls when I can, I also work with what I have and what is right in front of me. i like to lay my hands against stone. I feel a lot of life force in my hands, not specifically when painting, although I feel it in the painting when I look at it and it looks back at me. I feel that is what makes the painting a painting and not just a mess. A mess maybe! But not only a mess.
When I paint with my hands I love to squeeze, and smear and move faster and slower, and reach and bang the surface and use different sides of my hand to smear layers away in different areas until there are no clean areas left to use, and this feels like a personal thing, but it must be shared with someone who lived so many years ago that I cannot comprehend it with my human brain, it belongs to data.
There’s something about the invention of tools and implements and furniture that I feel to be a separation between humans and the rest of the world, that’s always bothered me in a small, itchy way. The sight of this human paint smeared palm that looked just like mine felt very comforting. Whatever happens with the tools and the data, let’s keep painting with our human hands.
Of, Sarah, I love you for the person you are, the woman I know you to be, and
a while back, I started painting with my fingers and wrists and arms on butcher paper
on the back porch looking out at the woods. It makes me feel free to write without
thought just moving my hands and fingers, conscious of my breathing and feeling part
of the natural wildness in front of me, to rid myself of the wild craven madness of
my country at this time, I can’t call it the US because it lost its soul.
Susan Baukhages
Thank you, Susan! I love to think of you painting with your fingers and wrists (wrists!) on paper on the back porch, watched only by the trees… keep hold of your soul in the midst of that madness
I love this, Sarah: “I am something that takes place amidst it like the tiniest ripple of a wave in a massive, massive ocean.” It reminds me of the first time we were at the kermesz in Olchowiec, and we were walking up the hillside among graves that were lit with votive candles, in a light rain in encroaching twilight, and I told you that I felt like the smallest drop in the biggest bucket in the universe and you said, “Me, too.” A moment I’ll never forget, and a feeling.
more hands and lights across space and time! I remember too… thank you for the beautiful reminder