STORY 1: RECORD KEEPING

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

In this section, I will talk about my painting and the use of paint as a record keeping tool throughout history.

The painting I created to represent this story of paint-making is based off paleolithic cave paintings. Cave paintings were one of the first things to come to mind when I started researching the history of paint-making because of the numerous examples throughout the world. Cave paintings in Europe, Australia, and Indonesia date back 40,000 years or more and depict images of animals, hunters, and herders. The painters used materials such as tree saps, berries, dried plants and roots, blood, and minerals to create their pigments (The Colorful History of Paint). They mixed these with a base of water, saliva, urine, or animal fats to create paint that they could use to depict what was going on around them. Today, we use the remaining paintings to try to decipher what ancient humans experienced and what their everyday lives were like.

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Another example of paint as a record keeping tool is Native American hide paintings. Hide paintings have been used by Indigenous people for an incredibly long time and are still being used today. While there are many uses for these paintings, they are commonly used as a method of communication and record keeping (Kachina House). Many of these hide paintings depict scenes of ordinary life activities and have been passed down for generations.

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References:

• House, Kachina. “History of Native American Hide Painting.” Kachina House's Blog, 28 Feb. 2017, blog.kachinahouse.com/history-of-native-american-hide-painting/.

• “The Colorful History of Paint.” Earthdate, www.earthdate.org/colorful-history-of-paint.