Blombos Cave

The original piece of ochre

from TLS Art in Lockdown - Tales from our contributors
June 12, 2020

My house is full of things. Heaped surfaces, busy walls and overloaded shelves make for dust traps beyond hope of inventory. Most items are either my own works, made over the last sixty years, or artefacts from Africa collected since an eye-opening visit to that continent in the early 1970s. A particular drawing that i often pause to reflect on as I pass up and down stairs, uniquely links these two aspects of my activity. 

Pliny said famously that “Out of Africa comes always something new”, but in my lucky lifetime that has rather meant something of ever greater age. Recent finds at the Blombos cave site, near the cape of South Africa, are exciting examples, the most important of them being an eloquent, abstract image. This takes the form of a piece of ochre stone, delicately engraved with a refined tool on its prepared surface, with a complex network of lines. The object, less than a hand span in length, can be securely dated to a period seventy seven thousand years ago, thereby doubling the history of drawing. It emerges from a culture that had already been shown to have produced, generations before, the earliest known jewellery in the shape of necklaces made from pierced shells.

The more I looked at photographs of the engraving, the more I was intrigued by its rhythmic sophistication. Copying the old masters is a traditional way for artists to understand their trade, and I was soon transcribing the marks this oldest of old masters had made. Such a slow procedure allowed me to relish each line, and explore the coherent net they built. While I worked, I became freed of all sense of scale, as if I were inhabiting a linear maze of epic proportions, walking its paths and exploring their intersections. At a miniature level, however, it was also a process akin to sight-reading a musical score. 

Pondering its (finally unknowable) meaning or purpose, I marvelled at its force as an abstraction, evoking an infinitely distant prefigurement of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. It seemed to contain the potential of all letter forms and ornamental devices, as well as the making of maps, the latticework of nature and even the schematics of engineering design. It was in essence the kind of structural meditation that would not be out of place in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. Art history is fond of attribution, so I have confidently ascribed, à la Berenson, this elusively purposive drawing to an ur artist provisionally named Og, of whose work I shall always remain an awe-struck admirer.