rock art

•

For over 30,000 years human hands have been picking up rocks to make art, or painting on cave walls. So art and people and rocks are a ternary that goes back longer than Uncle Ned whittled.

Early rock carvings were of voluptuous, fertile Venus figures; early cave paintings like at Chauvet in Southern France depict bears, horses, lions, panthers and other animals, but still it's artist and his media: rock.

If you want something to last—Parthenon, pyramids, Pietà—you make it out of rock.

Modern environmental artists like Andy Goldsworthy have simplified things, preferring to selectively stack stones in creative ways or places, but still it's art created by a human picking up a rock and rolling it around in his or her hands, considering the possibilities.

"Oh. What to do with this rock?"

Recently, we discovered a series of impromptu and impermanent rock sculptures in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the river just off the Alum Cave Trail. These instant creations are more ephemeral. With the heavy rains that have passed through the past few days, there's no way they survived. The rocks would have been reshuffled into the deck.

But for that day, the unknown artist's handiwork seemed as eternal as La Grotte Chauvet itself.

•