Painted Carnac

At first glance, the two dimensional dot constellations on the walls of Paleolithic caves may appear to be nothing more than a grid of polka dots upon a bumpy topography. To me they are more complex and inspiring. These marks transcend the merely descriptive and move to the abstract, if you will, toward a visual poetry. In Brittany, the 3000 standing stones, running across the landscape at Carnac were, to my eyes, analogous to those very same cave dots, now manifest in three dimensions, transported onto an actual landscape in what can best be described as intuitively aligned rows, where each massive stone points skyward, as far as the eye can see. The day prior to walking among the Alignements at Carnac, I had a similar sensation as I walked in a very different but similarly poignant field of standing stones: the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy. Looking in any direction, the white marble grave markers lined up, replacing with a sense of bedazzling regularity the hellish and cataclysmic turmoil of a World War. The arrangement of precisely placed grave stones was a human solution to place the incomprehensible into calming order. At Carnac the numerous rocks, some standing since 4500 BC, have no bodies buried beneath them, but seem to me to be the products of the same urge to wrest order out of chaos. Carnac's dot-like boulders and the clusters of dots in the painted caves tell the story of how human culture has instinctively grappled with chaos for eons.