VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION
  • HOME
    • VISIONARY ART GALLERY >
      • ARTIST OF THE MONTH
    • VISIONARY ART EMPORIUM
    • VISIONARY HALL OF FAME
  • FEATURED ARTWORK
    • DIGITAL ART
    • DRAWING
    • EXQUISITE CORPSE
    • GRAPHICS
    • PAINTING
    • SCULPTURE
    • MIXED MEDIA
    • PHOTOGRAPHY
  • ZOOM GALLERY
    • ZOOM 1
    • ZOOM 2
    • ZOOM 3
  • ASSOCIATED EXHIBITIONS
    • A LEGACY OF LIGHT
    • DREAMS & DIVINITIES
    • DREAMS AND DIVINITIES MEXICO
    • GARDEN OF FERNAL DELIGHTS
    • GRAND SALON VILLA BERBERICH
    • IM’AGO PRIMORDIALIS
    • INTERNATIONAL SURREALISM NOW
    • MINERVA ART GALLERY
    • PhanArt Viechtach
    • SOCIETY FOR ART OF IMAGINATION
    • VISIONARY ART AUSTRALIA
  • BLOGS
    • DREAMS & DIVINITIES BLOG >
      • DREAMS & DIVINITIES MEXICO 2013
      • FERNAL GARDEN
    • VISIONARY COMMUNITY BLOG
  • ARCHAIC VISIONS
  • SALOME
  • LINKS
    • ABOUT COPYRIGHT
    • CROWDFUNDING RESOURCES
    • FREIMALER
    • SAY NO TO FREE ART
    • THE MYSTIC OTTO RAPP BLOG
  • NEWS
  • VA TWITTER

The 'Bird Man' of Lascaux

20/3/2015

4 Comments

 
The notion that the cave paintings of Southern France and Northern Spain during the Upper Palaeolithic were painted by shamans is so ubiquitous in the visionary community as well as other circles as to effectively have become a kind of dogma. In archaeology, however, in recent years, this idea has come to be challenged in favour of a more nuanced view, and many of the images previously thought as shamanic now partake in a wider understanding of what little we can know of the Palaeolithic cultural context, the function of the art itself and of human creative and ritual behaviours. In my many years of studies in Palaeolithic artforms, there seems to me now only a handful of images with unambiguously shamanic elements. One such painting might be the famous Bird Man of Lascaux, but as we shall see, despite the shamanic nature of this image, it is not exclusively so, and partakes of wider cultural forms as much as any other image...

In many ways, the often cited category of the ‘Palaeolithic cave painting’ is a clumsy term, not least because the phrase actually represents several widely divergent traditions visible in three discrete time periods (the early-to-mid Aurignacian, the Gravettian-Solutrean and the Magdalenian) stretching across nearly thirty thousand years of the European Upper Palaeolithic. As such, it is hardly likely that the same ritual functions and cultural imports of the paintings would have persisted unchanged for such a long time period – indeed important clues of these changes can be gleaned from the architectural spaces of the caves themselves and the siting of the art within them, as well as from the interactions between the cave sites, particularly in the latter two periods.

There are also huge changes within the art itself, and the famous images of animals of the Eurasian Steppe represent only one strand of a rich set of traditions whose varieties and subtleties are easily missed from within a casual purview. In the earliest periods, dots and tectiforms of unknown meaning seem to predominate, but by the late Aurignacian (30-28kYa B.P.) the familiar images of bison, cave lions, deer and others take centre stage, with human-animal hybrids making occasional appearances. In the Magdalenian, abstract claviforms accompany animal images but the usage of the cave itself seems to be transformed into public and private spheres in a manner not seen previously.
Picture

Read More
4 Comments

On Vision & Being Human 8 - The Neurological Foundation of Visionary Experience

6/3/2015

3 Comments

 
After another brief hiatus, one of the main themes of our journey is arrived at for the first time, that of the capacity of human neurology to generate specific visionary experiences which many of us will recognise. This chapter presents the first evidential arguments towards the idea that the primacy of visionary experience is founded upon the human being, and not the external world. It should be recalled that we should maintain a genuinely humanist viewpoint here: just because these experiences spring from neurology and not deity (or 'reality') should not debase the intrinsic value of the experience. This notion will be greatly justified at length in the later chapters of this thesis, but it nonetheless fundamentally challenges 'traditional' interpretations, and our ultimate goal is to come to a new image of the human which transcends many of our contemporary antagonisms... But I am getting far, far ahead of myself - read on!!
In consideration of the foregoing, visionary experience which purports in all cases to provide a sensory window into a hidden reality presents a significant problem for the modern human, and the majority choices available thus far have been to either reject quantum theory (or fuse it pseudo-scientifically into the Classical Image somehow) or to reject visionary or religious experience as delusional and contrary to what our experimental observations tell us about the universe. Religiously-inspired positions that visions represent some kind of message from a deity, or that they are verifiable reports of a mystical ultimate reality, are as unsatisfactory and unrepresentative of a complete picture of human experience as atheistic ideologies, not least in the notion that an affirmation of quantum theory does not necessarily lead to a rejection of the value of visionary experience.

Rather it unhinges those experiences from a foundation upon literal interpretations of the Classical Image, and centres both the Image and the experiences themselves not on the external cosmos but upon the human being, our neurological structures, our social realities, our propensity for ‘seeing into what is not, towards a perceived deeper truth’. Here we find clarity, and a third path opening before us.
Picture

Read More
3 Comments
    Picture

    ARCHAIC VISIONS 
    Bruce Rimell
    Visionary Artist, Poet & Writer

    ​ACADEMIA - Bruce Rimell
    ​

    FaceBook Arts Page 


    ​Based in the twin cities of Leeds-Bradford in the UK, my work springs from an alchemy of vision and myth, ancestral past and shamanic future. Come & See, Look Within - What Will You Find...?

    Bruce Timell at the Visionary Art Gallery

    Archives

    May 2017
    April 2017
    August 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014

    Categories

    All
    Archaeology
    Britain
    Bushman Rock Art Series
    Celtic
    Crete
    Language
    Maya
    Minoan
    Myth
    On Vision
    Palaeolithic
    San
    Shamanism
    Southern Africa
    Visionary

    RSS Feed


    www.dickblick.com
this website is maintained by
  Otto Rapp
Picture
HOME

Weebly - Websites, eCommerce & Marketing in one place.


All Over Print Apparel by Yizzam

The MET
The MET