Burren College of Art

Keith Payne – Schull Exhibition!

West Cork artist Keith Payne is currently the subject of an exhibition in the Blue House Gallery, Schull. Get to see it if you can! We featured Keith on our Journal back in 2018, when he had an exhibition in the Burren College of Art Gallery in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare. But he also contributed some amazing work to our own Rock Art exhibition at the Cork Public Museum in 2015.

That’s Keith’s painting – based on the Rock Art at Derreenaclogh, close to where we live in West Cork – on the right, above. It was in the Clare exhibition and also our Cork Public Museum exhibition.

You have the opportunity to see the current show in Schull, as it’s on until Culture Night (Friday 22 September 2023). Early Marks is “…a study of the beginnings of art and the possible source of a prehistoric worldwide visual language…” That’s a huge subject, and Keith (below) tackles it with large, assured and spirited images.

. . . There is no Time associated with any of these works, as Time is a construct invented long after the images on exhibition. Hunter-Gatherers, the makers of Early Marks, lived in a visionary state now lost to western civilisation . . . The language of Early marks consists of imagery, symbols and patterns that have been left in the physical world but created in the ‘other world’ . . . Many of the forms are possible direct projections of electrical impulses from the brain seen during states of altered consciousness . . . ‘Entopic’ images that manifest as points of light in the absolute darkness of the mind in the cave . . .

Keith Payne – from the Exhibition Catalogue

Font Tray – part of a larger work titled The prehistoric development of visual language:

. . . Reading from left to right are the earliest images from South African caves then through Palaeolithic, Neolithic, to a column of Ogham which reads from bottom to top: “Visual Language” . . .

Keith Payne – from the Exhibition catalogue

Empty Quarter (above) – a geographical region in the southern part of Saudi Arabia: the largest continuous sand desert in the world. Now scarcely populated it was in prehistory more temperate and the petroglyphs represent fauna of the time. Keith has painted the images in different colours to indicate the different periods of engraving.

Kakapel (and detail), Chelelemuk Hills, Uganda (above). Keith has travelled across the world to find his inspiration: in this painting – set at the entry point to the spirits living within the rock – are three styles: geometric images by the Twa people, pygmy hunter gatherers; these are overpainted with cattle by later Pastoralists.. The final abstract and geometrical designs were added by the ancestors of the Iteso people who migrated from Uganda.

Lokori (above) – site of the Namoratunga rock art cemetery in Turkana Country of Kenya. Located on a basalt lava outcrop adjacent to the Kerio River.

Left side above: Paleolithic Images – found in paleolithic sites worldwide: Believed to be visual statements perceived during trance states. Right side: Entopic Images – produced in the visual cortex. Often geometric in form and linked to the nervous system, seen as a visual hallucination. Noted during altered states produced by the use of the entheogens and trance states, fasting and the total deprivation of all light.

Schull Blue House Gallery: Keith Payne’s Namoratunga Rain Man petroglyph on the left.

Teana Te Waipounamu, New Zealand

From Signs + Palette of Ice Age Europe: a possible Visual Language.

Waiting Room:

. . . Approaching the mystery of the sacred space one dwells, initially, in the First Chamber. Many caves of the Mid region of France are very deep with passages, rivers and massive chambers which stretch for miles. To enter is to commit to a journey into the Sepulchre. The first chamber is for adjusting to experience ahead, perhaps initiation into the mystery of total light deprivation with the sound of beaten lithophones and flutes, echoing through the darkness. Or the revelation of your totem in a state of trance, to then be led deeper to meet with the serpent force of the mountain and shown the way of the Shaman . . .

Keith Payne – From the Exhibition Catalogue

That’s me – at Keith’s Burren exhibition – awestruck by his Venus of Laussel.

Ronan Kelly discovered Keith Payne’s West Cork studio in this YouTube video

Keith Payne’s Early Marks

The Gallery in the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, recently opened an extraordinary exhibition by Keith Payne – Early Marks is a summation of Keith’s own insights into the beginnings of art and the possible source of a prehistoric worldwide visual language.

Keith Payne (left) and friend

We worked closely with Keith on our Rock Art Exhibition – long-term readers will remember his enormous and colourful depiction of the rock art at Derreennaclogh which lent so much visual impact to the exhibition and it’s included in this show as well. In addition we have seen individual pieces from this collection in Schull’s Blue House Gallery shows so we knew his interest in early art of all kinds. But individual paintings and sculptures, impressive as they are, are one thing – an integrated vision is something entirely different.

Keith’s Derreennaclogh painting is on the right – but what are those antlers all about? You’ll have to check that out for yourselves

And that is what we get at the Burren show – Keith’s long preoccupation with archaeology, anthropology and early art come together in a stunning sequence of artworks that lead the viewer not just through time and space (he provides a ‘Genographic map of the Human Emergence’ that shows the location of the inspiration for each piece) but also into that part of the human psyche that has always striven to communicate through art.

Robert contemplates the Venus of Laussel (above) and filiform (scratched or incised designs) occur throughout the world

We don’t know, of course, what some of these Early Marks meant. On one canvas Keith shows how a piece of ochre from Blombos Cave in South Africa (below) was engraved with diagonal scratch marks over 75,000 years ago. Our brains leap to provide an interpretation of such marks – to the modern mind, they must mean something – a tally, perhaps, or a primitive alphabet. We will probably never know exactly, but what we can deduce from such early markings and from all of the art that Keith shows us is that symbolic intent was embedded in the human cultural experience from the earliest times.

Faithful as they are to their models – Keith depicts cave paintings, rock scribings, Irish rock art, masks, a Venus figure, finger flutings – these are not copies of the originals, but come also from Keith’s deep knowledge of prehistoric and primitive art and from his own aesthetic imagination.

Finger fluting – when fingers are used to make marks on soft clay deposits on cave walls. Torchlight moving across the wall would have given life and movement to the images

In a pair of paintings with almost 3D tactility he shows how two handaxes represent a startling continuity of technology – one comes from Olduvai Gorge and dates from one and half million years. The other comes from England and dates to about 400,000 years. But identical handaxes have been found in sites that date to 40,000 years. A useful tool and a reliable technology persisted over time and produced these beautiful objects that truly united form and function.

For Keith, early marks spring from the visionary state which was part of the everyday ethos of early humans. His exhibition notes talk about ‘animism’ – a belief that that all things animate and inanimate have an intention of their own where there is no boundary between the physical world and the spiritual or ‘Other’ world.

Physical and cultural evolution are underlying themes in the exhibition

Those of us privileged to be at the opening were struck, individually and collectively, by the continuity of the human imagination over time. Curiously, the works seem to bring us together as a species, reminding us of common threads woven through our collective consciousness over the millennia.

Title: When the Great Door Opens – Turn Left

Louise Janvier, an artist, art historian and lecturer, who opened the exhibition summed it up this way in her erudite remarks: The work has literally been brought out of the darkness and into the light to reveal the ‘Animism’ of thought and with antiquarian curiosity stir the imagination to further contemplate on the nature of being. . . We can receive the offering and experience the closeness of the ancient world then absorb it as a visionary gift.

I will leave you with a final example of this ‘visionary gift.’ In this piece, from the perspective of a hunter hiding in an enormous cavern Keith views a herd of Woolly Mammoth passing by the cave entrance. The mammoths are rendered in true cave-painting style, leading the viewer into all kinds of rumination about the nature of these early depictions.

A trip to the Burren is a great experience at any time – make it before September 7th and catch this wonderful exhibition!