Caddo

I think this one is finally finished. It was an interesting challenge for me…how to make a simple image of a hill work as both monumental and intimate without establishing a scale for the image. There is a specific reason that I put those constraints on it.

The Caddo people were native to what is now East Texas. Just about all that remains of them in Texas are some place names. Like other tribes, they were treated harshly. The survivors of their encounters with white settlers were pushed to what is now Oklahoma.

Caddo Mills is a small town just east of Dallas. Not to be confused with Caddo, Texas, which is a small town west of Fort Worth. Then there is Caddo Lake, often described as the only natural lake in Texas, but most of it is in Louisiana.

Like many native tribes, the Caddo people built earthworks. There are some Caddo mounds preserved as a state historic site southeast of Palestine, Texas, and that is a very telling sentence. Many small towns in Texas have names that come from the Christian Bible, as if there was no culture here that predated them.

The Caddo mounds are small. Without the plaque furnished by the state, they could easily be confused with the remains of a more recent construction project.

It was that group of small mounds that I had I mind when I was making this painting.

I grew up around Indian mounds in southeastern Ohio. Many such mounds were originally burial sites. I have always thought of them as sacred places. I wanted to highlight and respect the sacred purpose of the Caddo mounds, and so the mound in the painting is both monumental and intimate. It has no scale. It exists outside of our time and space and always will no matter how long we are here.