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| Original Paleolithic-style rock painting by Lynne Gerard Ravenseyrie Studio & Art Gallery / Manitoulin Island |
For the past three weeks I have set up one of the work tables in my studio so that I can create new rock paintings. I've been painting on rocks in a manner influenced by Paleolithic cave art since first moving to the island 15 years ago.
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| Ravenseyrie Rock Art information card |
On Wednesday, I selected one of the many stone "canvases" that I had collected from the Ravenseyrie beach last summer. It's a lovely rock (I find them all wonderfully beautiful) and after turning it around in a number of directions I thought when placed horizontally, it had a shape and colour that would look quite nice with a pair of Ravens painted on it.
I put the rock "canvas" in an easel and sat down in front of it with my sketch book to work up a design for two Ravens that would best fit the contours and relief elements inherent in the stone. However, it seemed suddenly apparent to me that the stone itself had other ideas, for I soon imagined a woman with windblown hair was what wanted to be painted. I fleshed out a quick sketch as a starting point:
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| Rough sketch in ink for a rock painting by Lynne GerardRavenseyrie Studio & Art Gallery / Manitoulin Island |
I then made up some of my Paleolithic-style paint from local, hand-ground pigments and began to translate the image I had sketched in my journal on to the surface of the rock. I could see the placement of the woman was good and the rock seemed to agree.
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| Preliminary paint work on a rock "canvas" by Lynne Gerard Ravenseyrie Studio & Art Gallery / Manitoulin Island |
However, each time I attempted (first with just water on my brush) to begin to indicate washes and lines for windswept hair and more distinctly feminine features, the sensation was displeasing...did not feel or look right. So I got up, made some tea and let myself view the rock painting from different angles.
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| Rock painting in progress by Lynne Gerard Ravenseyrie Studio & Art Gallery / Manitoulin Island |
The sensation gained was that the rock wanted just a little more minimal detail and that done rather ambiguously, even though this gave an almost sci-fi feeling to the work.
Well, okay then - I had no problem listening to what the rock was saying and finding agreement because the sensation was quite lovely, even though at first it seemed I was leaving it in an unfinished state. But the more I looked at it, I was convinced the unspoken communication the rock had given me was right and it did feel quite complete as is, so I made another infusion of Ba Ma Sheng puerh tea and came back to sit in front of the painting and meditate upon what title to give it. I was thinking of something like, "With Thoughts Far Away", or "Remembering", but then the concept of "transgender" popped into my mind, quite strongly.
Feeling that I did not have a clear enough understanding of what transgender represented, I went online to do a little research. That's when I learned about a term called "non-binary". The National Center for Transgender Equality website gives this definition of the term:
Non-Binary Defined
Most people - including most transgender people - are either male or female. But some people don't neatly fit into the categories of "man" or "woman", or "male" or "female". Some People don't identify with any gender. Some people's gender changes over time.
People whose gender is not male or female use many different terms to describe themselves, with non-binary being one of the most common. Other terms include genderqueer, agender, bigender, and more. None of these terms mean exactly the same thing – but all speak to an experience of gender that is not simply male or female.
Why "Non-Binary"?
Some societies - like ours - tend to recognize just two genders, male and female. The idea that there are only two genders is sometimes called a "gender binary", because binary means "having two parts" (male and female). Therefore, "non-binary" is one term people use to describe genders that don't fall into one of these two categories, male or female.
That definition really seemed to resonate with the image painted on the rock and so I have given it the title of "Gender Non-Binary".
This is one of the special things that often happens with my rock paintings that does not occur when painting on paper. What ends up being painted on the rock 90% of the time is dictated by the rock itself and I am merely a conduit or facilitator for what seems to want to be expressed by it. It's a first for me, to paint upon a rock a human image that is genderless/gender fluid. It is not something that I ever contemplated doing before and I did not contemplate such an image this time either - it is an image that seemed to create itself...
That's a bit "woo-woo" and I don't quite know what to make of it, other than to appreciate and enjoy the process of how such things occur.