Shaman Staff Walking Stick-Part 10-Photos

I've done a little more wood burning on the walking stick since I blogged about it last Sunday.  This project is moving along quickly, but I never seem to have as much time to work on it as I'd like. 
  
(Sorry the formatting is giving me a problem while trying top get the pictures on here.  More of the blog post is below.)

Regular readers know that I am working on an art stick called Shaman Staff.  This walking stick is an art piece based on the idea that folk tales and anthropological literature represent many early cultures as having a shaman, wizard, or magician. This magical person generally carried a staff or wand that had strange markings on it.  The idea for this walking stick was to show what that staff was and what the markings might mean.  Read back through my earlier blog posts to get the full story on that and on the creation story that is burned into the stick.

So far on the walking stick I have dealt with the beginning of the universe and have moved the story into local time and space.  The images being burned into the walking stick now begin to deal with taking form.  The images are now going to be of things found in our world.  I'm starting with creatures that lived in the water as the theory is that life started in water and moved on from land.  So my first images in this section are fish, and that is as far as I have gotten with the wood burning.  From there it will move to insects, animals, and people.  As I blogged in previous posts, my theory on what information a shaman might have on the staff might pertain to information on what foods to eat and information on how and where to obtain it.  The wavy lines, a symbol for water, might have been information on how to get to the river, or where good fishing spots might be found.

(More of the blog post is below.  For whatever reason the blog platform will not let me move the text up below the previous paragraph.  Some days it works fine.  Other days you can't get things to work.  It has taken me a number of tries to get the pictures in the order I want them.  It kept changing the order.  I finally had to give up and say this is the best that I could get it to work today.)

The decorations on the staff might have been a mnemonic device to help people recall information in a preliterate era.  My theory was that in small populations, that much information could be lost if an event suddenly ended the lives of the people who had that information.  By having the information burned into the stick, the information was still available in some form, even if the person who had the information was no longer available.  For example, the pictures of the fishing net and fishing hook on the staff, not only gives information on how to catch a fish, but how to make a net or the best shape of a fish hook.  As a mnemonic device, each picture is not just a picture, but it also has information attached to it.  Perhaps when sitting around the fire at night the shaman went down the stick and told the stories/information that was attached to the stick.  Repetition of stories is a powerful way to transmit information.  Perhaps each picture carries more than one bit of information.  For example:  the first picture on the stick might be the beginning of the creation story, but also contain information on the history of the people by also containing a second story such as John wed Jane and their son was Jack.  The next picture might also contain the history that Jack wed Jill and their daughter was Sue.  Anyway, you can begin to see how much information that the staff might actually contain.  By constantly repeating the information on the staff, it would be easy to keep the details of oral history in order.  That is my theory, and I'm sticking to it.

 


I make my sketches for these images on graph paper in order to make sure that they will fit into the space I
have for them on the stick.  Then I transfer the image to the stick by the method discussed in earlier blog posts.  I haven't finished the sketches for all the creatures yet.  Some sketches I've completed have not yet been transferred to the stick.  I'll get more done on that this week.

I had something interesting happen this week regarding the walking stick.  I received a notification from Google.  Some of Google's photo enhancing techniques can capture images and turn them into an animation.  Somehow their computer program had been able to interpret the images of the phases of the moon on the walking stick as a progression.  They turned the pictures into an animation.  The stick turns and you see the phases of the moon change.  I may take the time to try to figure out how to post it on the blog at some point.  It was amazing that they could take the disjointed images from the blog and turn them into a seamless animation.  (By the way, if you have pictures on Google, this program is on by default.  You have to turn it off if you don't want it.  Seriously, you should read what this program can do.)  But other than the fact that some computer program was sifting through my images and turning them into pictures that I did not create in that form (creepy), it was kind of interesting what can be done with the program. 

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I will be posting pictures of some of my Halloween work on the Wednesday blog posts through October.  The next post on the walking stick will be next Sunday.