by hands, still
detail from ARKEO #1
Dave Bonta’s The Animators is an amazing dream story of cavemen creating images of their hands on rock walls. It’s given me an inspirational push to finish a post that’s been on my mind for a while.
I keep thinking a lot about hands and what they do. Hunt, plant, gather and eat food. Cook, clean, sew, build. Touch, hold, caress, massage, love. Hold tools to make, write, create, play. And print and paint hands on rock walls.
As regular readers know, I’m fascinated and inspired by the art of early humans. I’ve written about how common hands in rock art are in many parts of the world, including in Borneo.
In recent weeks, I’ve been also astounded by images of disembodied puppet hands at the Marionettemuseum in Salzburg, Austria, hands of the puppeteer (scroll down the page to see Tina Modotti’s photo), some gloved mannequin’s hands and a digital stop sign with a hand.
In my own work, I’ve experimented with scans of my own hands and have made collagraphs of them to use in one of my prints. Eventually I even printed my own hands directly on prints. And finally, there are the most recent examples using my own hands again in ARKEO #1 and ARKEO #2.
