Some famous researchers into Paleolithic art, David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes, believe the ancients may have seen the cave wall or rock shelter surface as a “permeable membrane.”  They say that the shamans encountered the spirits coming through that threshhold and, I suppose, immortalized their visions on the rock, so that the image continued to act as a wormhole for spirit. It’s worth hearing it from them:

“The painted images of another world made sense because of their location on the ‘veil’, the interface between materiality and spirituality.  The walls of the shelters thus became gateways that afforded access to reals that ordinary people could not visit – but they could glimpse what it was like in that realm as painted images filtered through…”

I like to create a permeable membrane.  What comes through are arrangements of lines, ideas.  The more random it is, the more I can see.  Many more transformations are possible.  It’s like ordering chaos, but allowing the background to meld with the foreground, the unconscious with the conscious. There has to be sufficient complexity for the spark to ignite, an invitation for the spirit of creation to arise.

That would make the artist a kind of shaman, though I don’t like that often-misused word.   And here’s a painting on that surface, full of random marks.  You might not know what will come through and leave its tracks, scratches, and breath on the surface.