The buffalo with a vengeance is a powerful enemy. It can toss a lion high and easily kill it. Yet they are peaceful grazing animals who prefer to find safety and speed in the herd. And it was herd animals such as bison and horses those cave artists mostly chose to paint.

We can observe two kinds of consciousness in the beast of the herd. When they graze and move the animals are peaceable and in the presence of a predator only know to escape. If a calf is taken down, however, that may change. Another mindset can kick in as they protect the ongoing reproduction of the herd.

We can find similarities to herd behaviour in humans. Take Raves as an example. I have been told a great attraction of the Rave is the oneness, "everybody thinking the same thing", a sense of belonging as they move into the state of altered consciousness.

Would those early cave painters not have been aware of the awesome power of a moving herd of gigantic bison. And to what would they attribute that power. We can think of these beasts moving in an unconscious kind of way and it is undoubtedly a particular ability of animals to do so. Perhaps the artists desire was to tap into that power. No, the animals were not Gods, but might the Chauvet cave people have considered them to be moving in that power of creation we call God.

Many creative people and some sportsmen will tell us that the 'flow' is being in that place where the unconscious works for us with ease. It is the place of greatest human effectiveness where instinct can be trusted. There is no need for thinking problems through. Creativity comes in a stream, we can know exactly which colours to use for a particular passage of paint and produce the finest brushwork at surprising speed.

We can understand humans as having deductive reasoning with an ability to solve problems. Yet it is usually necessary to find ways of getting into the flow, something which is quite natural for animals. The buffalo whose calf is taken may at times come to another kind of mental state which is not normal for them. We may also observe a change in thought pattern in domestic animals as they interact with human kind.

In these cave paintings we can see the deep feeling of reverence for these wild animals who moved so naturally in the unconscious state, just knowing which way to travel, having no question in their minds where a destination lay. They had the power of an absolute complete security in that knowing.

Present day mankind may well question the use of animals as helpers to find spiritual power and effectiveness, but they were very much an everyday part of those ancient peoples lives.

Mike Fone

The cave paintings at Cheveaux are possibly the only way we have of understanding the mindset of those people over 30,000 years ago. Yet also we need to understand their mindsets in order to fully understand the significance of the work. In this essay I am trying to plumb those depths.

The first thing the enormity of these caves tell us is that these people were a successful population. They enjoyed a surplus enabling certain workers such a artists to devote most of their time to painting. The implication is of a society which was fairly well organised with the knowledge and tools to build load bearing structures. Unfortunately there seems to be very little in the way of surviving artifacts to tell us much more.

The local environmental conditions can tell us so much. The land was probably steppe tundra and was at a maximum by 22,000BC according to Wikipedia. That is ideal hunting territory for a fairly mobile population. Yet at Cheveuax there is a cave which suggests anything but. So were there perhaps pockets of warmth where agriculture might flourish? At least we can be sure that food was plentiful.

So what might we reasonably assume the mindset of those times to be like. First of all they didn't have the memories of present day mankind.In a sense they had an innocence due to there being little in the way of a collective memory.The Great War which brought about the Existentialist Philosophy of writers such as Camus was not somewhere at the back of their minds, neither did they have great cities to contend with their equilibrium. There would very likely be a stillness and peace about the environment.

We might also conclude they were a peaceable people: they gave their surplus too art rather than the things of war. Perhaps they had not yet been threatened by other tribes wishing to enjoy the benefits of that land. Possibly there was still room for population growth. It is thought that the desire for dominance was a much later more northern concept.

The immense scale of these cave paintings at Chev aux suggest a great vision, or desire to find expression for a less tangible experience, awareness or feeling. It could well have been religious. It is very notable that for the most part the paintings do not include human being. Possibly there was a taboo against such depiction, but I suggest even more likely in that state of innocence they didn't have the self awareness which is very much a part of modern life.

If we consider these cave painters with our own understanding of the creative process then we might assume that this work was part of their searching. They had not entirely seen the end before they began the work. The creative process brings change to most of our well laid plans as we work. The artist will work in order to bring about their own sense of wholeness and hope thereby the bring this to others also.

So why were depictions of these magnificent beasts so important to these people? It has been said they thought these animals to be their Gods. Other trains of thought suggest these early humans thought in terms of the Sky God. However, I don't think it is good to make assumptions. It is possible to think of these animals as having some qualities of a God. They had massive strength but also the freedom to move about that tundra as they wished, to be self supporting and at one with their environment. Is it possible that these people considered those animals to have a secret which they did not. Would they not wish to know what manner of thing that was.

Mike Fone

There are these days a significant number of female artists, yet obviously the men are still for the most part successful. I think the reasons are rooted deep within the human psyche.

I begin by saying great artists are confrontational people. Cassat and Morrisot had to content themselves with nice family scenes. Gentilelschi was indeed confrontational but how many of her own paintings can you count on more than two hands and just think how badly she was treated.

Now I'll make another bold statement. Men generally speaking have a fear of women which they do not care to admit. That is why women have been oppressed historically. You will appreciate that people who are free to confront issues have power. Now women these days do have more power than ever and routinely confront issues in the daily course of business. However art is another matter. It often deals things of the unconscious. It may bring comfort but also may confront the issues we would rather not know about.

Rather than continue giving my conclusion, perhaps you ladies would care to give us what you see as the role of women in art. Do you want the power of confrontation or that of love and nurture? Quite clearly both are necessary.
Well I've put my big foot in it again and I do appreciate this isn't a comfortable matter for discussion. However, you may not feel comfortable playing second fiddle either. Great artists are not people who feel particularly comfortable with themselves let alone other people.

Mike Fone

Mike...I am posting this in response to your article...
I only heard about this Australian Artist last week...
Jan Dean told me after she heard about the artist on Radio National.......

"Although Yvonne Audette's distinctive, abstract paintings are represented in all our major art galleries, it's only now that the National Gallery of Victoria is celebrating the lyrical works which the young expatriate artist created in New York and Europe during the glory days of abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in 1930, Yvonne Audette travelled to the US in 1952. There, as she studied art, she encountered the radical new abstract work of artists including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey and Franz Kline. In 1955, she travelled extensively through Spain and then to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, where she established a studio in Florence and later, in Milan. Audette lived and worked in Italy, presenting numerous exhibitions, until 1966 when she returned permanently to Australia.
NGV Curator Kirsty Grant said:
The experiences of Yvonne Audette's expatriate years were critical to her development as an artist. Looking at the paintings and drawings from that time, the viewer can visualise the steady evolution of Audette's graphic vocabulary, from the bold linear quality of her earliest experimentation with abstract forms to the lyrical calligraphic and graffiti works for which she is renowned."


Artist Yvonne Audette is finally gaining recognition.......

While Audette has continued to work and regularly exhibit, she says she was ignored by critics and writers for many years. "I am only just beginning to be recognised. Women from very early times weren't given their due until the last 10 or 15 years. There's been a hold up in this country, a mentality that has for some reason felt the woman was not as creative as the man, whereas she has been given equal status in Europe and America since the 1950s and '60s."
read the full article here at The Age

Our search into the meaning and importance of imagery begins with drawings in a cave from some 31,000 years ago at Chauvet. Clearly these are not graffiti or random daubings to pass time, they are indeed skilled representations of dangerous animals with the odd human figure. Various dots and animal figures at Lascaux have been said by some, including an astronomer, to represent constellations and stars. Perhaps partly in order to investigate the authenticity of this find people from various disciplines were invited to view the cave paintings including anthropologists, artists and scientists. One sculptor notes how carefully the surface was prepared and how a particular cave was used, whilst another in the same complex might have been equally suitable contained no such paintings at all. It all points to a great deal of organisation. Whatever we might think the artists who produced this work were not primitive, they were intelligent people with vision who could see ahead in their efforts to overcome problems. They would certainly have had a far different mind set to our own and for that reason alone the problems of discovering the purpose of these paintings are considerable. For example the extender for the pigments in these works was not water but baryte and potassium feldspar. How else would they still be fresh to the eye even today. The great problem of conserving the cave paintings at Lascaux has been the ingress of people wanting to look.

Commonly held wisdom has long suggested that these paintings were nothing other than shamanistic efforts for attracting good hunting. That does seem have its problems though. For one the animals depicted for the most part were not part of the local diet and deer which was, is not shown at all. If such paintings were the work of a shaman then wouldn't you expect to see them in various locations demanded by the hunt? There is of course another considerable problem arising from the Chauvet discovery. Modern man is thought to have found his way into what we now call Europe around 30,000 or so years ago and these paintings are of the same period. There is no discovery to suggest a necessary building up of skills, just the evidence to suggest that an organised society quite suddenly appeared on the scene.

We could spend a great deal of time discussing what these paintings might not be and never arrive at the important conclusion as to what they really were. It is apparent that they were not the effort of some local artist, either passing time, finding self expression or making a living from them. They were part of a much greater scheme of things.

All good academics like to have solid evidence on which to build a hypothesis but there is very little of use in this part of France. The one significant thing we do know is that this time was the end of an ice age. Temperatures were rising and this location was becoming inhabitable by people from farther south. Another bit of commonly held wisdom says these people would have been hunter gatherers with no agricultural knowledge.

So here we are trying to decide why image making should be so important to these people with scarcely a shred of evidence. Neither do we have a hope of entering their mind set to truly understand their thinking. Conjecture may be the best thing on offer. True we can examine what seem to be similar societies of the present time, but I wouldn't want to bet on that for any sound conclusion. The caves at Chauvet and Lascaux were surely on such a scale to suggest a cathedral like importance. Whether for mobile hunter gatherers or an agricultural people they had to be centres of considerable importance.

A rather negative piece of evidence is that they didn't have writing so would want to record events. But these paintings are not apparently of specific events. They might have wanted to record hunting kills for the time of year but it would be rather a grand gesture for such a simple purpose. Most historical records would be held by tribes in memory and passed on verbally.

If we can now think in terms of logic and what we do know the image is powerful because it does not require the same thinking as spoken or written language. There need not be the same filters which prevent direct communication with the emotions. The response is often instant and instinctive. As Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message.

Now I'm going off to have another think about this and you might want to join me.

Mike Fone

On Picasso standing on the shoulders of giants.

I have been wanting to paint this last week or so, so maybe it is time to re-evaluate things and possibly myself. Take the painting of Rugby I've just begun as an example. Will it just be another very ordinary town scape or something more. I've been wanting more for some time, but haven't been able to see a way forward. I can almost feel what I want but not describe it in visual terms. Now that does give me a clue. We can paint what we feel. Anyhow in order to get a better idea I am looking at one of the greatest creative innovators of if all time to see if I can pick up any hints.

My reference is Picasso, O'Mahony, Star Fire, 2006

"By all rights, Picasso should have become a minor artist, a fashionable illustrator or decorative painter. But something happened to change his fate."

That's Karmel writing the book's foreword. I find it hard to believe that even he believed that statement, but accept the exaggeration he has used to make a point. In 1905 Picasso met the Stein family, and so the work of Cezanne and Matisse.

The book is a sketch in which O'Mahony takes us through Picasso's life examining his circumstances and society at large at the time of particular works being produced. It offers an insight into Picasso's character and how he reacted to situations. We see the man as a complex character; arrogant, unable to sustain a relationship, continually wanting change, as turbulent as the sea, yet able to take high moral ground. He seemed to hate the very things he loved doing. He remained in Nazi occupied France and joined the Communist Party in 1944. He was always wanting the new but also had considerable courage which enabled him to plunge ahead at considerable risk.

The young artist certainly showed exceptional talent a very early age and became well trained in classical art techniques. But what happened to cause an awakening. His going to Paris no doubt shows an indication he felt himself to be missing something. Did visits to the arty Four Cats in Barcelona fuel his fire? In Paris he is very much influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec but is not producing anything particularly new. Perhaps it was just one of those times in life when good things seem to come to an end and it is time to move on or stagnate. It may be down to opinion, but I find his works of the Blue Period to be meaningful and the Rose Period beautiful. They were not shocking but I'd be prepared to challenge Karmel's statement that Picasso was still a minor artist.

No doubt the young Picasso recognised in Cezanne a man who had in many respects recreated art. He would climb on that artist's shoulders, leap off and run. There is also the fact that Cezanne showed the possibilities to explore a vision which could also incorporate the changing facets of society and scientific discovery. The timing simply could not have been better. In 1906 Picasso's palette is sometimes simplified but the landscapes are otherwise pretty well ordinary. The big breakthrough was however happening in 1907. It clearly took Picasso very little time to make this ground breaking transition. If we think Les Demoiselles d' Avignon ugly then so should we. Picasso is telling us that prostitution was not a nice business. It is in every sense a shocking painting about people for whom he felt considerable concern. He had been showing his sympathy for women of this type for years and his relationship with Fernande Oliver was still ongoing, so what emotive circumstance could have produced this explosion of power? Was it perhaps that Picasso had managed to find it within himself a new clarity of vision suddenly manifest after the years of searching.



Mike Fone

"Cixi" (portrait - Mike Fone)
It must have been in the later Seventies that underground sociologist Alvin Toffler wrote his best seller Future Shock. He had garnered a whole lot of facts to support his idea that change was going to happen so fast and furious it would be all but impossible for folks to keep up. This change was going to impose previously unknown stress, and he predicted major problems to the individual psyche and society as a whole.

Tofler’s first prediction has been absolutely correct. Rapid advances in technology mean it is hard for people in many good jobs to ever stop learning. Those people who do have the good jobs also have the problem of insecurity as much as anybody else. Even public bodies such as Social Welfare often only offer short-term contracts to new employees. And need we point out that getting to work at all in a big city is a major stress problem.

However, the second part of his prediction seems to have overlooked the adaptation abilities of mankind. People seem to have ways of dealing with these problems. Change has become a way of life and some people seem to welcome it as refreshing in some ways. Why not go for another job in three years then uproot and move to another location.

Change for the corporate companies means growth and new markets, plus a lot of stress for those who have to create them. For the rest of us it means being at the end of massive marketing drives, being told what we have to buy, need and should want to make us feel better. And since nothing much we buy is going to last long, shopping has become a major item. So part of the marketing hype is about getting us to change our likes and dislikes. It’s about selling dreams, and the technology is making so much possible. Do I really need to replace my 4 year old computer? Of course I don’t, it’s quite fast enough, but sooner than later the new demands of the software force me into it. I end up buying what four years ago would have been a massive workstation to do my typing. So, I can use it as my family entertainment centre, use the Internet for the shopping and never leave the house again. I can even do my work at home it’s less stress. It’s called cocooning. Some people are telling us that’s the way our society is heading. Marketing people are not ignoring this trend.

Have we bought the dreams? I think of those people who get truly distressed when their favourite soap character has to die, because they’ve been written out of the programme, those who use credit to buy the car of their dreams. It’s live now and pay later all the way.

But I’m asking myself, have we really adapted to all of this change, or just found ways to avoid the consequences in the short term. Are their ways we have decided to live in a world of dreams made possible by the advanced technology of our age and has the price yet to be paid?

I’m sure these things have been talked about many times, but my question is how should artists face this issue. Nice paintings for the home have long been the backbone of the art world and no doubt will continue to be so. Artists have to make a living. However, we could say this work is only a kind of first aid for the ills of society. Something more is needed. We can all enjoy a trip to dream-world at times, and in some societies it’s thought to be a necessity. If it help us to live with day to day realities, then why not. Well, maybe sometimes it doesn’t.

Another option is carry on dishing out the shock, as if we haven’t had enough already. Some of the big movers in today’s art world can’t get it to us fast enough. If it’s destructive that’s just too bad, it is often exciting.

Should art have an answer at all? Should artists be expected to provide an answer for the ills of society? It’s a big call, if that is so. Is it something, which local, relatively unknown painters can begin to address? If it were a truly important issue, then would it not require a great artist to produce important art? I think there are a lot of artists who just never got to be in the right place at the right time, and a lot of others who never got hold of a vision. There is plenty of potential; artists of sufficient merit, just missing greatness by a margin.


Mike Fone

One day Monet was taking a walk with a child through a field, as no doubt he had done many times before. Suddenly he had one of those rare defining moments, which even for the atheistic artist must have seemed like an epiphany. On this afternoon the landscape was different, for there was a certain something, which demanded to be caught on canvas. The child was made to go back and get the paints, however as any artist will know, the light can change quickly and the essence of what is seen with it. Yet from that afternoon Monet would produce paintings of haystacks, which critics agree have an intangible sense of otherness.

Perhaps most of us have had such experiences for that brief moment in time when nature has seemed more intense and beautiful. We may wonder if it was the warm breeze on a twilight evening, the redolence of a meadow, and the sound of bees gathering pollen, or a heat haze over a field. An emotion is provoked within us, which seems to have a new depth, yet so very often the moment passes and we pass on our way untouched. Or was it something of nature opening itself to us, something in another dimension we cannot see.

It was in 1922 that a young physicist Kaluza teamed up with a mathematician Klein offering a theory, which should have changed the face of science. Kaluza himself had one of those rare moments when he realised that there is in fact another dimension behind the three known to our cognitive awareness. This theory was mostly ignored at the time, yet now physicists are indicating as many as 26 dimensions, which they think can be proven mathematically. The String Theories are far from complete and the math amazingly complex, yet they have now entered into the mainstream of science. Other physicists and mathematicians such as Roger Penrose and John Wheeler are trying to push science far beyond the limitations of human understanding where things are not computable. They say that nature and indeed the universe has more to do with human consciousness than was realised. Wheeler seems to be saying that matter only exists at all when observed. Clearly Wheeler has to be too down to earth than to mean the moon only exists because we can see it. Possibly he is struggling with an idea just outside the field of his own intellectual awareness, and it is presently defying expression.

No doubt the light, which is so very important to painters exists in another dimension. What we see is simply an interaction of light with matter. Sound is nothing but variations in air pressure striking our eardrums. Our sensory organs send messages to the brain, which then processes the information to make of it what it will, and we know much of that depends on our own cultural inheritance. Artists such as Monet and Manet were setting out to record nature and the world before them as they saw it. Often this would mean breaking free from the way almost everybody else saw things, as they strove to understand what really was before their eyes.

During the centuries before artists had tried to paint reality. Jan van Eyk in the early Quattro Centro had produced a hyper real style of painting, although his aim was clearly not to show the viewer any ordinary reality at all. He had statues of virgins, which would climb down from their niches and walk through an imaginary cathedral, and the faithful of those days had actually claimed to see such things. Importantly many other artists took up the technique in order to paint some resemblance of reality. Further on in the Renaissance artists had dropped the superstition and belief in hallucinations. The virgin who might be the artists own wife had much less of a stylised face. Perspective had been understood scientifically, and the way light works in shadows perceived.

The Impressionists were certainly aware of these things as they studied the old masters. However, their idea of reality was not necessarily in showing detail. It was their first sight of a scene, which mattered, the essence of what was before their eyes. They used the Renaissance discoveries, for example, of how it is simply not possible to cast a shadow by laying down a glaze of blue paint. In the shadows things are seen with softness, obscuration is at play, tonal variations are subtle, and colour works differently. I spite of the rapidly changing light they were able to use the advantage of tube paints to observe and paint directly from nature out of the studio. We may0the time of Impressionism is past and all done, but should we not learn the same lessons. Our eyes first look at a scene, on which every small detail capable of being resolved is transmitted to the visual cortex this incredible amount of information is processed by the brain in a fraction of a second, after which the first impression is given. We do not actually perceive all the detail, as our brain will have edited out the unnecessary. After this we usually select detail as a conscious function. We all walk along a certain street and see things according to our own mindset. A lawyer asking for the various witnesses to street crime for hard evidence would no doubt bear this out. However, we do now that our brains can be trained to see far more that is normally the case.

It would seem that our first lesson would be to be like Monet and take those rare moments of heightened awareness seriously, accepting them as nature’s invitation to learn how we should see. It is an exciting possibility, which can open up a whole new world. Yet how can we capture that otherness? If it is truly intangible, a reality working in other dimensions possibly affecting our own, is this possible? Water colourists especially will tell us that much of what they do is happy accident as the paint spreads over the paper of its own accord. Certainly the brushstrokes are not entirely controlled by the intellect and we usually find our greatest success by relaxing our minds and hands in a sense of play. The constant training of exercises will then pay off. The answer must be in loving and absorbing the essence of what we want to paint, then be passionate about the paint itself as it goes onto the canvas. This is not to say that we should like Pollock go into some kind of Dervish trance, or like Clifford Still take up New Age activities in order to paint. Still and Rothko were concerned with expressing their own inner states, not what they saw before their eyes. Figurative artists may well want to use the unconscious, but will need the mind to be boss.

Anybody who wants a case for the necessity of inner vision should think of Monet again. Practically blind, he produced what is arguably his most profound work. Telling a child to select his tube of colour he would then put paint on the canvas and so the masterpiece. And is it not the great artist the one who pursues his or her own vision regardless of the cost or difficulty.

Mike Fone