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.

Talking Stones

 No water – that’s why we left Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the base of Dalatabad fort in Maharashtra India, pueblos in the American Southwest, Once-Green Arabia. Place after place no longer able to sustain life. Where will we go? We must go … to stay is to die … to leave is to hope. Menaced by hunger and thirst, we journeyed on the maybes of hope. We are all refugees, migrating from our once home into a vast unknown. Where can I drink? Where can I sleep? I choke on the dust. The sun blinds my eyes.

Using a 1986 map from National Geographic, we plotted the sites
that would give us the best picture of Ancestral Pueblo Culture.

Ancestral Pueblo Culture

In mid-September, my friend Nadine Cobb and I made a trip to explore the Ancestral Pueblo Culture of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. The trip was a chance for Nadine to get an overview of the region she now calls home and for me it was an opportunity to do on-the-ground research for Eve’s Imprint. Please note that the word “Anasazi” is a misnomer for this early peopling of North America. It is a Navaho word meaning “ancestral enemies.” To use it shows disrespect for descendants of first Americans. The preferred term is 'Ancestral Pueblo Culture.'

Our itinerary took us in a loop northwest from Albuquerque, north to Colorado, southwest to Arizona, and then southeast back to Albuquerque. Our stops included:

• New Mexico - Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Aztec Ruins National Monument  (misnamed by Spanish conquistadores when they stumbled upon evidence of early settlement)
• Colorado - Mesa Verde National Park
• Arizona - Canyon de Chelly National Monument
• New Mexico - Acoma Pueblo, Petroglyph National Monument, and Bandelier National Monument.

The highly symbolic T shaped doorways found in
Chacho Canyon and as far south as northern Mexico
may symbolize lakes known to exist under mountains
where cliff dwellings are found.

While I read several books in preparation for the trip, the one that gave me the deepest understanding of the ‘Stonehenge of North America’ was House of Rain by Craig Childs. Searching for why people left their highly developed culture in Chaco Canyon and where they went, Childs unveils an ancient understanding of and symbiosis with the hydrological cycle. He has suggested a possible symbolic meaning for the T shaped doorways, as noted above.

Survival Involves Perpetual Motion

From time immemorial, for beasts of earth and sea as well as birds and bees in the sky, the drive to survive has driven hourly and daily life. Homo sapiens learned from their predecessor primates and other animals, including their predators, where to find and secure food. As hunter-gatherers, our ancestors followed schools of fish and herds of mammals to the best sources of water, forage and salt.

This prehistoric hunter has snagged a long-horned goat. 

And so it was that peoples of many ethnicities found their way through and over the Bering Strait into North America at least 12,000 (probably more) years ago. Amidst their seasonal rock shelter campsites they left traces of their wanderings. About 7500 years ago, two factors prompted these roaming family clans to hunt smaller animals and collect edible plants: drier and warmer climate as a result of the recession of the glacial sheet and the near extinction of large grazing animals by natural and human causes.

Staying Longer

Roving bands of basket makers began to stay longer in regions that provided a year-round supply of water. Over time, they built small pit houses, partially underground, and their highly portable baskets were supplemented by the pottery they learned to make. As a sedentary lifestyle took hold, they made improvements on their pit houses and developed above ground structures. They did not abandon the safety and community feeling of the old pit houses. Instead they turned them into kivas, places of ceremony, ritual and retreat.

Pit houses were entered through a smoke hole in the roof. As they evolved,
adobe became a preferred covering for the above ground part of the structure.

More and more, foraging turned into farming and the former wanderers tucked small fields into canyon corners and on mesas. People domesticated the turkey. As they figured out how to channel water to the fields, they could count on a consistent supply of squash, beans, and corn (a plant introduced from the south). Using yucca fibers, people made sandals and wove turkey feathers into blankets for warmth in the winter. Across the landscape of the Americas, dispersed households, large granaries, and public structures began to emerge.

Populations increased, a diversity of crafts emerged, and trade intensified - not just among diverse clans in the region but also with people as far away as Mexico and the west coast. With trade, new ideas percolated through existing patterns. In addition to occupying new areas, different ethic groups began to converge into small villages, increasing opportunities for social interaction, trade, and ceremony.

Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon was one of a series
of great houses where people gathered to trade, to learn new skills,
to organize public work projects, and to hold ceremonies that
included use of McCaw feathers and copper bells from Mexico.

Cultural Enrichment Flourishes

Chaco Canyon in western New Mexico became a gathering place and spiritual center for many dispersed settlements. People in the canyon coalesced astrological wisdom that must have guided the hunter-gatherers of old. They wove this wisdom into ceremonies celebrating the movement of the sun and moon. Public structures built in Chaco are aligned with the movement of the sun and with the cardinal directions: east, south, west, north, above, and below.

Even with the Chaco River as a source of water, Chaco Canyon was an unlikely place to build large-scale kivas, great houses, and a vast network of roads. One can only surmise that a cross section of wise leaders and creative thinkers somehow arrived in ‘the middle of nowhere’ at the same time and sparked a cultural revolution. After about 300 years of expansion and amazing architectural feats, people began to leave Chaco Canyon and were virtually gone by 1200 CE (current era).

People moved from Chaco to Aztec Ruins and emulated its highly skilled masonry
 structures. Archeologist Earl H. Morris conducted excavations and studies at
Aztec Ruins for many years. One of his last contributions was to supervise
reconstruction of the Great Kiva according to all that he had learned.

Most likely a series of droughts forced Chaco's burgeoning population to disperse to better cropland and more abundant water. And disperse they did: to the north to the four corners area (Aztec Ruins and Mesa Verde), to the south (Rio Grande valley and beyond), and to the west (Canyon de Chelly and further west). They took the Chacoan culture with them. However, dispersion meant that all the skills, crafts, and wisdom that made Chaco great were no longer available to each group of migrants. The synergy of many creative minds was broken as settlers became migrants once again, but memory of Chaco’s accomplishments has never been lost.

Talking Stones

From the first hunter-gatherers who followed herds through North America to tribes from Canada that descended in the sixteenth century into regions left by Chacoan peoples, human beings left messages on the rocks and canyon walls through which they passed.

The central figure in this rock image from Utah
is startlingly similar to the Wandjina (creative force) image still
painted and revered by Aboriginals of Australia.

Some of the earliest rock images in the four corners region are similar to ones found in Southwest Asia and Central Asia. For example, a longhorn goat at the end of a long spiral closely resembles similar petroglyphs in Iraq and Iran. Were some of the wanderers into the American southwest descendants of, or related to, those who followed herds through Mesopotamia and into Central Asia? Photos of pictographs in Utah are startlingly similar to ones painted by Aboriginals in Australia. Did the coastal ramblings that took some of our early ancestors to Australia also continue north up the coast of Asia and across the Bering Strait?

Whether chipped or painted, rock images convey the human impulse to share one’s meaningful experiences with others.

• This is the place through which I walked.
• Mark this place where hunting was good so we can find it again.
• Here in this auspicious place, let’s create a ceremony to the creator celebrating the gift of water when we were thirsty.
• Maybe if we record our ceremony, we can hold it in our minds as we travel on.
• If we make an image here, we can track the progress of the sun across it and predict when it will be best to plant our crops.

Recording of a ghost dance.

Our ancestors experienced all of the same impulses that drive us to send an email, post on Facebook, or keep a journal. Rock images remind us that we are them and they are us.

Except for the map, all photos are from Google Images.

Trash Midden of my Mind

Priest King from the ancient civilization in the Indus Valley in present day
Pakistan. Early agricultural settlements going back as far as 7000 BCE
rival those found  in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 

I am sitting on sand-colored ground smoothed almost to a polish by the bare feet of villagers in Kendur, India. A dark indigo sky, almost black, twinkles with a sprinkling of stars. The angular faces of villagers seated in an asymmetrical circle come in and out of view with the swaying of flames in tiny oil lamps placed before them. The flickering light cast by these half-pear-shaped lamps mesmerizes me. A string at the top of the pear feeds oil to the flame. Made of clay, they fit perfectly into the upright palm of a hand.

Earth Spirit rock carving, related to fertility, reveals how
the idealization of feminine power has a long history.

We sway to hypnotic Hindi singing and I pull my green wool sweater close around my neck. The chill I feel is more than the cooling of air after the departure of the sun. There is something strangely archaic about this ritual celebrating the end of the summer harvest, the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil. I have stepped out of the modern world into an annual event that has been going on for generations. My modern world has ended. I have entered another time, an ancient world peopled by my ancestors.

Bhimbetka Cave Art: Bulls and stag in Madha Pradesh Central India,
just north of Maharashtra where Kendur is located.

Halfway around the circle, a woman lights a kerosene stove placed on the ground before her. It is no larger than a man’s bowler hat. She places a pan of water over the flame. When it boils she adds tealeaves, spices, and milk. I am handed a tiny cup the size of a lemon. Sipping chai warms me. I cross my legs and sit back comfortably, lulled by neighborly voices around me.

Bhimbetka Cave Art: Interesting juxtaposition of women and bulls.

A woman leans toward me, holding a large leaf upon which rests a pyramid of small reddish brown balls, shining with syrup. I take one and bite into a confection of milk and sugar with a hint of something that I had tasted in the tea. Later I will learn that this treat is gulab jamun and the spice is cardamom. A sugar rush pops me awake and my eerie feeling dissipates. Lamp flames are burning down. Shadowy figures rustle and begin to disappear into the darkness. Mary gives me her hand to help me rise from the ground.

Bhimbetka Cave Art: I see this image of two men under
an arc as representation of a ritual experience.

All that remains of my first Diwali celebration is a memory in the trash midden of my mind. Within a week I have left my green sweater in a pedicab in Pune, a careless gesture I rue as the days become cooler.

Southwest Asian Alcove of Eve's Imprint

The images presented above are ones that I am working into a build up of 4"x4" panels to represent the Himalayan mountain range. Below the built up area is my Bengal Tiger executed in old maps of India and blow-ups of cave art found in Bhimbetka cave.

Bhimbetka Cave Art: I did transfers of this battle using elephants
 and horses for Pakistan and Afghanistan, below left.

Bhimbetka Cave Art: I used transfers of this elephant and bull image
for parts of India and blow ups for the stripes on my tiger.

I am on a journey that is both deeply solitary and frighteningly communal. I am living amongst the dead, following a trail of blood and fragments of visual culture left by the multiple migrations that have peopled our planet. I am compelled to take this journey and share this story because I have continually bumped into it in accidental encounters in various regions of the world where I lived as a local resident.

Initial placement of 4"x4" panels for Himalayan range north of India

As with most journeys, this one is fraught with surprises and uncertainties. I had no way of knowing that the happenstance leading to being a first year teacher in the Black inner city of Chicago would lead to Eve’s Imprint, a visual art project tracing our human migration from East Africa to all parts of the world. Taking one step at a time, I began catching glimpses of our one Black Mother. Over fifty years of glimpses led me in 2010 to send a DNA sample to the Genographic Project of National Geographic so I could see in concrete terms how I connect to Mitochondrial Eve.

Replacing my funky test tiger with maps to begin the real one.
Starting to visualize the India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan section of Southwest Asia

When I began art work for our one Black Mother, I started with her home in Africa, a continent to which I had traveled at the age of twenty-three and to which I made numerous trips as a grassroots empowerment activist. Six Africa paintings later, I was confused about next steps. Wanting to stay somewhat in my comfort zone, I moved on to Southeast Asia, a region in which I had lived and worked for nearly five years. Three paintings into that region, I paused to do five pieces on my maternal and paternal ancestral paths out of Africa.

Himalayan Mountain Ridge begins to take shape.

I had been searching for parameters and guidelines for this body of work and it was working on my self-portrait that revealed my passion for maps and for working on several pieces that cohere as one larger whole. Bouncing back to Southeast Asia, I did six more pieces. This year I moved on to Southwest Asia, our maiden migration out of Africa. I hoped two years of living in India, the eastern edge of Southwest Asia, would give me an existential basis for the work.

Using tracing paper, I begin making the tiger's head stripes with blow ups of the red cave
 art of two elephants and bull and the nose with a blow up of the ritual performance.

Humans Are Migrating People

Around the world, hundreds of thousands of people are on the move, uprooted by war, malnourished by abject poverty, and fleeing land made infertile by years of drought caused by global warming. The nations toward which they move with hope for a better life find their social systems over taxed and resident populations reluctant to embrace these newcomers.

I glue my tiger onto the board and use an old map of Goa
 for the leg that is in shadow.

This has happened before. Millions of people moved into or out of India and Pakistan when independence brought the birth of two nations. Thousands of African Americans, slave and freeborn, made the arduous trek north during and after the American Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of Protestants fled persecution in Europe, seeking freedom of worship in the new world. The list goes on and on.

Beginning to visualize the connection of the western section
of Southwest Asia to the eastern section.

We are all one global family. We have all descended from one black woman in East Africa, Mitochondrial Eve. All humans alive today share the DNA map of this one woman. All of us are the product of migrations across planet Earth, migrations that began 75,000 years ago when the first homo sapiens left East Africa, following schools of fish and the glimpse of green hills in Yemen.

I change the blue of the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal to a greener
teal color to represent the vegetation upon which the tiger depends.

Our global family, created via multiple migrations, is bound to the earth. Our existence depends upon the fruits of the land. When survival is threatened in one place, we move to another. Over time, the interactions created by one group coming in contact with another lead to new innovations and enriched cultures. But in the immediate moment, migrations are messy, confusing, and disturbing.

17% of my DNA matches that of people in Southwest Asia. I hope that sharing my work of creating Eve's Imprint will catalyze your own inquiry into how you have descended from Mitochondrial Eve and are connected to cultures across our planet. 

Unveiling Our Maiden Migration

I discovered this incredible book of maps at the home of a friend.
It is an awesome source of endless inspiration.

The moment of truth had arrived. The boards were blank. As an experimental artist who refuses to plan everything in advance, putting the first mark on the painting surface is a moment of huge discomfort. I know that whatever I put there will be “wrong.” It is simply the tiny “bindu” spot from which everything else will evolve. Knowing it will later have to be changed, I must nevertheless mar the surface and initiate the creative process. It takes courage to err!

I had already spent two months in preparation and still I did not know what I would be putting on the configuration of boards that will represent our human migration from Ethiopia into Southwest Asia. Two months of preparation? Whatever for?

The answer is two fold. First, shifting from one region of the world to another is almost like beginning a whole new body of work. It is so overwhelmingly complex that I hem and haw and fiddle with odds and ends, procrastinating as I attempt to remember how I started on the last region. Secondly, it takes enormous research in order to begin conceptualizing a creative way to express multiple levels of information and emotional content.

Maps reveal the ever-changing human perception of the world.
They are a very old form of art. 

Overcoming Inertia

There are to be twelve alcoves when Eve’s Imprint is completed. So far I have done three of these: African Origins, My Ancestral Journey, and Southeast Asia (completed this winter). I began the Southeast Asia paintings in 2012, but interrupted them to do pieces for My Ancestral Journey and one of the eight environmental banners that will accompany the twelve alcoves. After over three years of toil, finally completing Southeast Asia meant I had to decide what region of the world would be next.

My final piece for the Southeast Asia alcove of Eve's Imprint is
Ecosystems Stick Map, a riff on a navigation tool used in the Marshall Islands.

Since 17% of my DNA matches that of persons in South West Asia and I lived in India (the eastern edge of SW Asia) for two years, I figured that gave me a leg up on some of the other regions of the world. Three India paintings in my Pilgrimage series had mined my personal experience of living in rural villages. This alcove of Eve’s Imprint would require that I put my personal experience into a larger historical and geographic context.

I like to use maps from Doctors Without Borders because they help me
distinguish contemporary countries. Here I delineated South West Asia.

In May I began studying maps and rereading material on the migration of homo sapiens beginning around 73,000 BC. I checked out a world atlas from the library and copied maps of various regions with which I will be working, using this exercise to work myself back into the overall project. I also checked out resource materials on SW Asia, including a video on the disappearing Bengal Tiger.

The Bengal Tiger is on the list of endangered species.

What if?

Ideas began to percolate. What if I focused this region, the first migration site out of Ethiopia, on the environment and animals they met there? What if I used a large tiger head to represent India, elephants for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh; and camels for Saudi Arabia? What if I made the large tiger head out of old maps of the area?

Soon I was enlarging maps of the region to figure out the sizes and configuration of boards that could best represent its geographic contours. Not only do I love maps, I see using them in my compositions as a means of lending veracity to what I am presenting. That is also why I plan to use images of art and artifacts from the region. I’m not just making this migration stuff up; there is real scientific research (genetic, geographic, archeological, anthropological, environmental, and geological) that has produced this contemporary understanding.

After experimenting with a variety of board sizes and configurations,
I arrived at this arrangement. The smaller boards are for islands.

Once I had the configuration of boards plotted and had put gesso on them, I backtracked to do some research on Persia (present day Iran), since that culture had a big impact on India. When I found some marvelous photos of ancient art of the region, I had the idea of creating a multilayered area of 4” x 4” artifact tiles on the Himalayan area of the India board. These could dramatize the power and impact of the Himalayas on the Indian subcontinent. (More on this in a later blog.)

I began creating a “test” model of the large tiger head that will cover most of India. Meanwhile I perused a book on Persian potsherds that I found at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. I thought I might use transfers of the potsherds for Iran (Persia). To test this, I tried laying photocopies of some of these on the Iran section of the Arabian/Iranian board. Oops, not so sure.

My first test model of creating the tiger head out of old maps of India.
Enjoy this funky version; the final one won't look like this!

Moment of Truth Arrives

Once I had a “test” model of the tiger’s head, I faced the moment of truth – actually making a mark on one of the boards. I decided that the parts of India that would not be covered by the tiger’s head should be the red-orange that you see everywhere – in clothing, architecture, magazines, films, and all paraphernalia. It’s a good color because India has a very fiery culture. But before I mixed and painted that color, I thought that if the tiger is made out of “positive” map images, then it should be surrounded by the sort of “negative” images that one gets by doing transfers. Plus the porous texture of transfers gives a sense of being from a long time ago.

This led me to an Internet search for ancient cave art of India that I had stumbled onto in an article in Wikipedia. I was thrilled when I found just such images. Of course these were small, so off I went to FedEx Office to make color enlargements for my transfer process. With these in hand, I confronted my insecurity about the best way to do the transfers. Do I put the gel on one surface or both? Do I put it on with a brush or a pallet knife? How long do I let it set before I remove the paper backing? Am I going to use a wet toothbrush to remove the paper or roll it off with my bare fingers?

Just do it, LiDoña! Stop procrastinating and do something! Be willing to be wrong! Nothing is final but you have to start somewhere. Ok, I’ll start with Pakistan and Afghanistan because being on a smaller board the transfer will be easier to work with. Fussing and fiddling as I tried to remember how I had done this in the past, the first transfer went down and I left it to dry.

This is a transfer of Indian cave art depicting animals I do not recognize.

Unveiling Our Maiden Migration

As I was sorting through my Indian cave art images, now spread all over the studio floor, a thought crossed my mind. If there is ancient cave art in India, I wonder if there is in Iran? Wouldn’t that be more genuine in terms of the time period of the first migration than potsherds from several thousand years later?

Sure enough, an Internet search turned up prehistoric Iranian art. Well, what about Saudi Arabia, the first stop on the migration path out of Africa? More searching brought up Arabian rock art and Pre-Islamic stone writing. Even more exciting was the discovery of the Palaeodeserts Project begun in 2013. This international multi-science research project is turning up evidence of a Green Arabia that comes and goes when the climate changes. The first homo sapiens to leave Africa and set foot in Arabia found a land of lakes, grasses, and animals. It's hard to imagine that now but as we are beginning to experience the effects of climate change on agriculture in California perhaps we can empathize with the flux and flow of flora and fauna in Arabia in response to shifting levels in the water table.

Scenic countryside in Hail, Saudi Arabia. This is to become part of the
largest eco-park in the Middle East.

My wall of ignorance about the migration into SW Asia was beginning to crack. I was beginning to generate a variety of ideas about how to symbolize our maiden migration. Back in the studio, my excitement carried me through disappointment with the first cave art transfer I did for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Indeed, what I had put down was wrong in relation to what I tentatively visualize for the India board. It has to be removed. But I’m ok with that because it did its job. A trickle in the creative process has started to flow.

For more about Eve's Imprint go to my website www. lidonawagener.com.