Love Is Blind

Red lines show female migration routes from tracing mitochondrial DNA.
Blue lines show male migration routes from tracing the male chromosome.

Our Maiden Migrations

Following the first human migrations across the southern end of the Red Sea about 75,000 years ago, some of our ancestors settled in Yemen which at that time was greener than it is today. Others sailed on along the coasts and again, some people settled on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula while others sailed on to the Persian Gulf.

I don’t know how many generations these migrations took, but there was a continuous pattern of both settlement and further travel: those who stayed and those who moved on. The settlers inhabited the land adjacent to the coastline and began venturing inland. The travelers sailing along the coastline reached what is now Pakistan, India and India’s neighboring islands. From there they went on to Southeast Asia. No one knows what navigation tools beyond the stars and oral history were available to those who first took to the sea.

Islands As Steppingstones

Many generations passed and the ice age had to end before Europe and Asia were reached. As populations expanded, islands such as Ceylon just southeast of the tip of India and the Nicobar islands farther to the southeast became trading crossroads. Others such as the Maldives to the southwest and the Andaman to the southeast were sparsely settled and remained quite wild. In creating the pieces for the Southwest Asia alcove of Eve’s Imprint, I decided that including the islands would help people grasp the waterborne nature of these first ancestral migrations. 

Map of Sulawesi serves as cover of Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond. 

Because I’m in love with the maps in Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond and the multiple and changing perceptions they reflect, I decided to use a variety of maps on the island panels surrounding India. The maps can be confusing because there was no standard orientation. Some early map makers put east at the top, some put south, and some put west. Many mapmakers used the ocean and sea areas on their maps for depictions of the objects being traded. Others emphasized the boats and ships carrying trade goods. Still other mapmakers pictured the winds that were critical for boats to move.

I’m sure that during the Middle Ages when these maps were made there were farmers in the fields of Europe, the Near East, and China who did not know of the existence of these maps and the new worldview they presented. Most people went about their lives as they always had, some believing the earth sat on the back of a large turtle and others that at a certain point ships would fall off the edge of what they perceived as a flat earth. But for traders, sailors, and an educated elite these new art forms were as provocative as Paleolithic cave paintings had been for people of that era.

I worked first on the island of Ceylon, contemporary Sri Lanka, using a map that depicted products and landscape. The colors went well with the shaded part of my tiger (map of Goa). Sri Lanka has a beautiful tear shape that appeals to me and I wanted to emphasize that so I blew up the map to make it fill the 4” x 4” panel. 

The later addition of a blue river, an elephant, and a touch of green from the Sulawesi
map, linked this panel to the one to its right and brought this panel to life. 

To give the panel some dimensionality, I took another smaller map of Ceylon and placed it on top of the blown up one. I knew the composition was too “flat” but I left it while I worked on the others.

I spent a lot of time finding maps and images of the Maldives, a series of small islands to the southwest of India that are disappearing as a result of climate change. After several compositions came and went, I decided to use a blowup of one map as a base and to cut out pieces from a lower scale blowup of another map to put on top of the monster map.

Rising water due to climate change is covering
the Maldives. I wanted this 4"x 6" panel to suggest the
beauty and cultural diversity that are being lost.

I found a tiny snapshot of a traditional Maldivian boat sailing on the Indian Ocean. I really liked the graceful shape of the boat and the sail that mirrored the tear shape of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). I blew that snapshot up 800% to get the boat to be the size I wanted. I debated about using a tracing of the boat or drawing and painting it, but decided against those ideas. The base map for the Maldives blends nicely with colors in my India tiger.   

To the east of India and lying along the coast of Burma (Myanmar) and Malaysia are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. They may have been part of what were called the East Indies; that’s a guess, I really don’t know. Early mapmakers were confused about where one set of islands ended and the next ones began. I found three maps that I liked and decided to use all three on this panel, one on top of the other. The base map is the same one that served as the base for my India tiger.

The pale map with colored edges shows the coastline best
while I liked the drawing of the islands (pink) from another map best.

Letting Nonessentials Go

Since the Nicobar Islands were a steppingstone to the riches found on the islands of Indonesia, I allowed my love for the map cover of Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond to get the better of me. The book's cover is a map of Sumatra that is oriented with west at the top. It represents the battles fought between indigenous people and greedy European traders.

Even though I loved everything on this panel,
you can see how busy and lacking in cohesion this was.

I took the most dramatic section of the map as my base for the Nicobar panel and glued cut outs from a map of the Nicobar Islands on top of it. I added European ships from elsewhere on the map to show the conflict. However, once I put that panel in place I could see that it was totally competing with everything else, including my tiger. There were too many queens and too few commoners. 

I tried some minor adjustments, such as covering one of the two very dramatic elephants. That didn’t work, however it gave me the idea of adding a lower scale section of the river and one of the elephants to the Ceylon (Sri Lanka) panel to tie it to the Nicobar panel. Ships often stopped in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before and after trading in Sulawesi (Indonesia). This added the dimensionality that I had felt this panel lacked.

After making my sketch, I saw immediately that the second ship
to the left was too much and eliminated it.

I decided it was the whole lower section of the Nicobar panel that needed to go. I traced that section and used the tracing to cut out sections from the book cover map and from two other maps. 

As much as I loved this section from the book's cover, I could
see that it did not fit with the other island panels or my tiger panel.

I tried using a section of one of the maps I used for the Andaman
Islands. That didn't work but it gave me the idea of using a
section from the base map on the Andaman panel.

The colors in this map brought the Andaman and Nicobar panels
together and were more in keeping with my tiger.

At the top of the panel, I changed the size of the Nicobar header and
added more of the Anbdaman base map to cover competing colors and shapes.

On an artistic level, the island panels need to integrate with each other and the larger surrounding panels. Therefore, I added a couple of ships to the Andaman panel to connect it with the Nicobar panel below. Over and over as I worked on these island panels, I had to confess that love is blind. Things that I loved on their own did not work in relation to each other.

Many refinements are needed on these small island compositions. But for now, I am ready to leave the islands as they are and go on to the Arabian and Persian sections of Southwest Asia. Only when I have the total configuration of panels will I be able to see what other changes are necessary for the islands to complement and not compete with the major panels.