By Nancy Rynes
June 2021
More about The Old Ones
Oil on Panel, 18in x 24in
SOLD
Sometimes ideas for my paintings come from a place outside of waking consciousness. This isn't often the case for my traditional works, but several paintings in my "Relics" series had their genesis in my dreams. I guess that is when my overly-analytical waking mind shuts down, allowing my dream state to play with ideas and images as much as it wants.
That's what happened with "The Old Ones."
The idea for this piece came to me as I awoke from a dream. It was just there, in my mind's eye, finished. While the image of the painting seemed a little misty around the edges as I woke, the subject matter and title were clear as day to me. I immediately arose, found some paper, and made notes and sketches about it to ensure I didn't forget. But I really didn't need the notes or sketches - the vision for this painting was burned into my mind.
I started on the painting itself later that morning....it took me only about 15 minutes to locate the perfect Spanish Mustang reference photo from my own archives. This is a grulla Spanish Mustang mare from the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in Hot Springs, South Dakota. I knew the painting needed to be almost monochromatic so this gray mare fit right in.
I chose a Spanish Mustang because of their long and rich history as a breed of horses. Their origins go back at least a thousand or more years. And while some of them were used by the Conquistadors as weapons against the Native Peoples of the Americas, to me that doesn't detract from them as amazing Creations in their own right. Their bloodline may be ancient, but they are horses very much suited to the modern world - intelligent, small, tough, resilient, and with a ton of endurance. I personally would love to call one my own friend someday.
Once the horse came into focus on the panel, I started work on the background rock art. What should I choose? I knew I wanted something very old and I eventually decided on art from what we call the Pecos River style (southern Texas and northern Mexico). Rock art in this area are the oldest oil paintings in North America - some coming in at over 4,000 years old. The Ancient Artists mixed mineral pigments with oil binders and achieved an early version of oil paint. This style of rock art is also very large in size and I knew it would scale well with the horse. So Pecos River style it was.
I dug through my photos from that area and came up with several examples to use as reference. I picked a few, then arranged them in a pleasing composition. The main artistic concession I made was to intentionally de-saturate the colors in the rock art. In reality, these rock paintings are quite colorful, but I decided to gray them down a bit so they faded in to the background and wouldn't compete too much with the horse.
If you have sharp eyes, there is a little gift in the upper-left part of the painting for you. This small portrayal of a mammoth in rock art pays homage to a recently-discovered panel from southeast Utah. This site, known as Upper Sand Island, is thought to be between 12,000 and 13,000 years old, perhaps even older! The panel is very weathered and the petroglyphs are not easy to spot, but in the right light you can see two Columbian mammoths, a giant bison, and several other indistinct figures (animals and humans). Archaeologists are working on verifying the age of the site, but preliminary research points to this being genuine. If so, it would be the oldest known existing rock art in North America.
I wrapped up the finish by adding layers to the background to give a hint of weathered rock. I then added some suggestions of scrubby plants and grasses to the foreground, again keeping the colors desaturated to maintain the overall monochromatic feel of the painting.
As with most of my "Relics" paintings, there are many layers of meaning piled on to this piece. For me, it speaks to those people from very ancient times who left their influence all across this world. They were our ancestors, and they were not very different from us. They lived, loved, hunted, had children, cared for aging family members, told stories, and created art. Many wanted to leave their mark on this world in whatever way they could, and they did. Another layer of meaning is wrapped up in that gray Spanish Mustang - she tells me the value of toughness, endurance, and understanding our history.
Will any of our monuments be around in 4,000 years? In 12,000?
And is it valuable to keep these time capsules of ancient history around? The rock art? Historic sites? Our stories? Animals of historical importance? I think it is. Sites such as the one depicted here are visual reminders of where we've been as a species, the challenges we've faced, and how resilient we can be.
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