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"The Central Mountain of the World"
Conte - 9" x 12" |
| In one university drawing class we were
given the problem of creating a mountainous landscape from observations
of a rock of our choosing. This was a technique employed by Pieter
Breughel, the Elder (1500) at the beginning of the Renaissance in
northern Europe to create his great season cycle of large paintings, The
Harvest, The Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow and The Fall of
Icarus.
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| On a weekend trip to Gumlog, another
friend's lake house, I became aware of the neighbor's sand pile and how
the dogs had walked around and over it in their version of King of the
Hill and randomly altered it shape. I remembered that long ago
class problem and when I could I set to work. One of the hiking
buddies took pictures.
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| In a book read 20 years ago, Lame Deer -
Seeker of Visions, a modern day Souix medicine man wrote that in helping
people living off reservation who had become lost in the big city come
back to their own identity he would ask them to imagine some place from
their youth and to make that place a spiritual Central Mountain of the
World to which they could attach themselves and then go on with living.
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| Australia's aborigine look upon the isolated
monadnock Uluru, Ayers' Rock, with the same spiritual connection.
They went there and did their thing to help guide John Glenn at the dawn
of our Space Age. Glenn reported seeing sparks outside the space
capsule while their bonfires blazed 100 miles below. They believed
it was their sparks that he saw. The sparks and their source
remain as unidentified.
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| Urulu the drawing is not. It does
however have that mystical sense in terms of metaphysical surrealism to
where it becomes The Central Mountain of the World. It can be a
meditation piece.
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