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I got the idea for Rainbow Belt from a photo in a great book about handicrafts in colonial New England, The Age of Homespun, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The photo depicted a strap of Native American design, woven in 18th-century New Hampshire of linen and dyed porcupine quills by Rachel Meloon, a European-American woman who had grown up among the Abenaki, for her neighbor, Peter Kimball, who carried it, I understand, throughout the Revolutionary War. For Rainbow Belt, I re-produced designs from Rachel Meloon’s strap, but I skipped some, made some up, and colored them differently. I have always liked pure, traditional designs, Islamic and Indian carved latticework screens, Minoan pottery and fresco, Neolithic cave painting, Anasazi and Mimbres pottery, American Indian design of whatever provenance. Most such art is non-representational, or, as with a Mimbres hummingbird or a Levantine rock-art spear-man, abstracted. I do not remember the original inspiration for separating the bands of images from Rachel Meloon’s strap with bands of Rubin’s vases in color spectrum sequence. I suppose it had something to do with the cross-cultural nature of the artefact symbolizing the unity of mankind. Or maybe I made that up after the fact. No tracing was involved. I drew the strap designs by hand, one by one, on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper, using mechanical pencil, ruler, protracter, square, compass, and Michaelangelo-style pounce stencils. The ranks of Rubin’s vase-faces were all drawn free-hand, which is why none of the faces really match, what I like to think of as a my low-rent variation on Shi Huang Ti’s Terracotta Army.
Ted Silar 