Shaman of the Birds - Limited Edition of 10 Print

Artist's Statement : 2020 Art as Shamanism: Many art historians believe that art has its roots in shamanism and that its original function was to illustrate the shamanic experience and be a focus for shamanic power. Shamanic art is one of the tools of the shaman, just as are the rattle and drum. This is true whether the art is on the cave walls of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 years ago) or on a newly painted canvas. The artist is the one who communicates myths for us. In todays “modern” society it is the function of the artist to interpret the “unseen” things, and step outside the confines of learned culture. Paints and pigments can be approached as ritual objects, magical energetic substances, the tools with which the artist brings forms forth into manifestation. When we are with our ritual objects, our paint, brushes and canvas, breathing, making every part of the process a trance inducing play, the artist is participating in a meditative ritual of creation, and transformation, and deconditioning themselves from the community’s instinctual distrust of the great unseen mysteries, and journeying into the unknown and bringing back the insights encountered there in the form of art. Every normal human being (and not merely “the artist”) has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his/her subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or of liberating procedures … that allows voyages into the transcendental presence of the “other”, to yield systems of knowledge that can be brought back into ordinary social space for the benefit of the community.