Rather, they are human-like figures with elongated forms and interior spaces filled in with paint or cross-hatching, wavy lines, dots, zigzags, and snakes. These are not human shapes as we would recognize them. The age and size of the images challenge our perspectives on American art and history. Instead, there are “friendly associations of animal, bird, snake, and plant images with anthropomorphic spirit figures.” He describes “virtuoso image-making techniques” and “life-size to heroic-scale anthropomorphic figures such as the Holy Ghost.” There are no violent depictions. He adds, “Barrier Canyon style has emerged to be one of the two major Archaic Period painted-rock art styles in the United States and possibly in the entire New World.” Sucec says this is “a style that lasted, if the dates are correct, an amazing seven thousand years.” “Utah’s first expressionist painters,” Sucec calls them. The “billboard-sized” Great Gallery is 300 feet wide, with more than 80 figures, many near life-size. They created no distinctive architecture, but the art produced by these hunter-gatherers stuns observers who come around a corner in a deep canyon and see these enormous panels for the first time. Now they have found close to 450 outdoor paintings.Īn exhibit of 24 of these photographs, with captions and wall text, is traveling for several years to local venues across Utah, with support from Utah Humanities in partnership with the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, allowing folks who may never venture deep into Colorado Plateau canyons to see these remarkable images. At the time, Sucec and Law thought there were about 160 Barrier Canyon art sites. Sucec received a Utah Humanities research fellowship to initiate the project. Visual artist David Sucec, director of the Barrier Canyon Style Project, and photographer Craig Law teamed up more than 25 years ago to inventory this rare Archaic rock art style. The most famous panels are the Great Gallery, Buckhorn Wash, the Holy Ghost Group, and the Harvest Panel. The locations are often miles from the nearest paved road, in the remote recesses of Canyonlands National Park and on Bureau of Land Management lands across Utah, Colorado, northern Arizona, eastern Nevada, and parts of Wyoming. The brush strokes and vibrant paint pigments make the images seem fresh and newly painted, yet one carbon dating of an embedded hair from a paint brush dates from 6750 BCE. The paintings are usually a dark blood-red color, probably made by mixing blood and clay, and possibly using urine as a binder. Yet circling these fierce, faceless creatures are delicate menageries of exquisitely painted birds, ducks, geese, deer, and, occasionally, free-floating eyeballs with wings. Snakes writhe in their hands or above their heads. Most have no ears or noses and no way to distinguish gender. Of the anthropomorphs, or human figures, only 20 to 25 percent have eyes. The images of eerie, elongated figures with shortened arms and legs are hard to decipher. To find these remote panels, often at the intersections of 700- to 800-foot canyon walls, I have driven off-road and then hiked to remote locations to photograph the spectacular ochre-red paintings.
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