Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Intersections

I love it when disparate parts of my life come together. In this case, it is the work of a blogger I follow, a Halloween pattern a friend is using and a non-fiction book I'm reading. First the blog, Cynthia St Charles' Living and Dyeing Under the Big Sky. She's been sharing photos she took of petroglyphs at Legend Rock. Yesterday, she unveiled a work that incorporates many of those petroglyphs here. It's called Vision Quest, and includes a character she says is typical of Dinwoody type petroglyphs (third photo down in that link). That figure reminded me of something that I couldn't quite put my finger on, until today. It is somewhat reminiscent of this little guy from a Susan Garman Halloween quilt pattern.


Then I opened one of the books I'm making my way through, Stephen Ambrose's, Lewis & Clark: Voyage of Discovery. In the early 1800's, Lewis and Clark headed up the first U.S. exploratory expedition west of the Mississippi into territory that would become our states of Montana, Idaho, Washington & Oregon. Along the way they kept journals, made maps, and studied the native peoples, wildlife and flora. They wrote about Indian paintings on rocks along the Missouri river, so when I saw the above picture, I naturally assumed it was one of the petroglyphs they wrote of. petroglyphs being on my mind anyway. It certainly looked like some of the petroglyphs in Cynthia's photos. But no. According to the caption, this was a sketch Clark had made to record one of the "new" animals they'd run across. Can you guess what it is? I admit I don't have much imagination when it comes to these things. I always wonder how the experts can be so sure of the animals being depicted in these petroglyphs when it isn't very obvious to me. I never would have guessed that Clark was sketching a bighorn sheep like the one in the engraving below by
Alexander Lawson.


1 comment:

Deborah said...

cool