M. D. Davis is working on the largest painting she's ever done. In her cavernous North Dallas studio the air temperature is comfortable, neither too cold nor too hot. The light is ample and natural. Vivaldi is playing on the stereo and the air is full of music she hardly notices. She stands at a massively sturdy waist-high table which is completely covered with slabs of stone. Presently, she is concentrating on an area roughly the size of a dinner plate, subtly shading in an intriguing figure with a color she has blended and re-blended perhaps thirty times, until she is perfectly satisfied with the match. "Running out a color," she calls it. She works from memory, notes, drawings, and a thick folio of photographs she made seven years ago at a site named Rattlesnake Canyon. When she is done, she will have covered some eighty square feet of stone.
I am Wayne Davis, her husband. I, too, am an artist and I have contributed much to this project. I will contribute more later, but this time is hers alone. I love watching her work at this stage. Her concentration is profound, but her facial expressions reflect only serenity. This is her world and she rules it completely. She works with an intensity and passion that makes the air vibrate.
She paints images she has collected from an archaeological site in Val Verde county named Rattlesnake Canyon. The canyon itself is a "side canyon" or tributary watershed on the Rio Grande River some ten miles above the confluence of the Pecos River. These images are from a shelter in the east wall of that canyon.
Why Rattlesnake Canyon?
"Because of its historical significance. Some of the oldest signs of human habitation in the North American archaeological record come from Rattlesnake Canyon. There are radiocarbon dates back to 11,000 B.C.E. In this very same canyon, not two hundred yards from this shelter, there are red monochrome paintings of horses, and a man wearing a European style coat, carrying a crucifix. Its a long record. These images were painted around 4,500 years ago. To put that into a human history perspective, someone made this remarkable chronicle at the same time that agriculture was looking like The Next Big Thing in Mesopotamia, and in Egypt workers were hammering stakes in the ground to mark off a building project we call the Great Pyramid at Giza.
"This particular gallery is so striking. Dramatic. There is an amazing vitality in these figures. I've heard it referred to as "the party scene." Look at how carefully they used contrast to outline the individuals. All of the colors are here; reds, yellows, white, black. They used the whole palette available to them. This was an important message to someone. That's why I'm passing it on.
"In spite of their age, these paintings are fragile. You can see in my photographs that the bottom third of the entire gallery has all but been washed away, barely discernable now because of a tremendous flood through the canyon in 1954. Imagine surviving nearly five thousand years and coming so close to annihilation fifty years ago. Anything can happen. People shoot at them. They try to chisel them out of the walls to steal them. They spray- paint over them. This record could be lost forever, so there is a preservation imperative here."
M. D. works with the same pigments that the original artists used. Exactly the same. She powders the minerals by hand in a 600 year old stone mortar that I found when I was ten. Reds from fire treated hematite, ocher from cinnabar, blacks and greys from charcoal and manganese, white from kaolin and barite, yellows from limonite. It's a labor intensive process, but one she seems to enjoy.
What is the binder you use for your pigments?
"Not going to tell you."
The Anthropologist Carolyn Boyd made some pretty authentic colors using marrow from the long bones of deer, and saponin from yucca roots as a thinner. Is it something like that?
"Nope. Not even close. It's a secret, so you might as well stop asking me."
Whatever it is, it has a pleasant, wholesome odor and it imbues the colorful powder with life and intensity.
T
he stone panels she works on are cut on three sides. Long and narrow, each one is a different width. When the painting is done, we will take these six stone panels and fix them into footed steel frames. The panels will then be joined, hinged to each other to form a long screen or space divider. The tops of the stone panels will extend past their frames and will remain naturally formed, one flowing into the next in a line reminiscent of a mountain range.
The finished piece will be our entry in this year's Western Design Conference in Cody, Wyoming. It is the third year we have been juried into this most prestigious of shows. The level of craftsmanship exhibited at the WDC is astonishing. The cash awards are generous. The artists are some of the finest in the world. Ideas are freely exchanged there. Inspiration and possibilities are traded like baseball cards. It is the single most friendly and cooperative trade show I've ever seen, and we are honored to be a part of it.
Wayne Davis | June, 2004
Note: Ancient Visions won the prestigious Exhibitor's Choice Award at the 2004 Western Design Conference