David Peat

100 From Certainty to Uncertaintyand doorways allowing people to enter into other worlds. West Coasttotem poles speak of a family’s relationship to creators and keepers ofthe animals. And, as the eye moves back and forth across a Chinesescroll, we sense a different way of structuring space and time.Paintings can employ many different devices to achieve their ends.Some are emblematic and use colors in a heraldic way to representevents and historical figures. Some tell the story of the life of a pharaohor king. Some are highly diagrammatic and represent the essence ofobjects rather than their external visual appearance. Some paintingsare devices used to instruct or to relate myths and legends, a kind ofearly comic book illustration. The paintings of Australian aboriginesare journeys, maps of the land and locations of power where the ancestorswalk during dreamtime. In other cases, painting is an expressionof pure joy, as when a variety of motifs are used to brighten up furniture,caravans, barges, and so on.In each instance, line, color, and form have been used to creatediagrams, symbols, maps, and illustrations of particular aspects of theworld. Paintings indicate the ways particular peoples have chosen tostructure their world and, in turn, paintings are the representations ofthis structuring. They could be thought of as providing ways of seeinginto the past, into the landscape, into the energies of nature, and intothe powers of the gods, or simply an expression of delight at the visualappearance of the natural world.The vast majority of the world’s paintings employ one or more ofthese devices. This is why, from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenthcentury, Western high art is particularly unique. For several centuries,and to a greater or lesser extent, it downplayed these other approachesto painting because of its concern to represent the world in ahighly illusionistic way. Its aim was to perfect ways of representing theappearance of things at single instants of time.This is not to say that other civilizations did not engage in illusionisticrepresentation. After all, portraits painted on the lids of Greek andRoman coffins are quite realistic. Nevertheless, since the Renaissance,Western art has been concerned with illusionistic representation. Inpart, I believe, this stems from an increasing sense of having objectifiedthe world within the mind. Rather than living inside of nature, human