Rainbow Belt II: Psychedelic Kaleidoscopic Digital Art – Etsy
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, carved latticework screens of provenance Islamic
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/islamic-screen.jpg?resize=242%2C300&ssl=1)
and Indian,
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/indian-screen.jpg?resize=250%2C250&ssl=1)
Minoan pottery and fresco,
Neolithic cave painting,
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/animals-and-hunter-on-the-stone-wall-of-the-cave-paintgerasimov_foto_174S.jpg-.jpg?resize=300%2C166&ssl=1)
Anasazi pottery,
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/anasazi-pot.jpg?resize=300%2C280&ssl=1)
American Indian design of whatever provenance.
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/hide-painting.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1)
Most such art is non-representational, or, as with a Mimbres hummingbird
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/mimbres-humm.jpg?resize=274%2C300&ssl=1)
or a Levantine rock-art spear-man,
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/pintura_rupestre_castellon.jpg?resize=300%2C228&ssl=1)
abstracted.
I do not remember the original inspiration for separating the bands of images from Rachel Meloon’s strap with bands of color-spectrum-sequenced Rubin’s vases.
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/optical-illusion-rubins-vase-1915-science-source.jpg?resize=155%2C180&ssl=1)
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, protractor, 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.
![rainbow belt](https://i0.wp.com/tedsilar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/terracotta-army-1864982_1920.jpg?resize=300%2C212&ssl=1)