The Artist Meets the Critic

The artist, Leila Daw, and the critic, Robert E. Kohn, discover some mutually binding interests. In her artworks, ostensibly exploring the concepts of mapping, Kohn recognizes the brightly colored dots, zigzags, grids, sets of parallel lines, and nested curves that pulsate in the Paleolithic cave paintings, suggesting that her art-enabling genes carry the memory of those geometric forms from tens of thousands of years ago. She had not been aware of this influence on her work and excitedly wonders "if this is why I'm so interested in ancient sites and paleolithic and neolithic art." When Kohn detects her subtle effort to portray three dimensions together with two in the same artwork, she joyfully responds "thank you for this!" Daw's respect for levels of dimensionality along with her joyous use of thick paint and tactile effects reveal the skepticism of Abstract Expressionism that she shares with Kohn. This book deals with contemporary art criticism, cave paintings, Jean Clottes, Clement Greenberg, Fibonacci series, genes and genetic memory, Paleolithic cosmology, mapping and shamanism.