JOHN GURCHE, PALEOARTIST

I can function as a portal to take you to a variety of places.

But, in the case of the art that I do, it usually has something to do with taking you back in time to look at these early ancestors.

Lacking a time machine which I dearly wish I had, I wanted these paintings and sculpture to be able to function as that kind of portal and to take people to a different time, and have them, for a moment, just be able to imagine this creature alive.

If you’re curious at all about what it means to be human, then you’ve got to be curious about how it got to be that way.

I think it’s inconceivable, almost, to not be curious about what we are exactly. What kind of phenomena do we represent?

Human evolution as it turns out, is not a matter of everything we think of as humans, slowly evolving in tandem, that here we are: ta-da! Modern Humans?

It’s more of a mosaic affair, with some things really evolving very early and some things very late. So, if you look at a particular ancestor in the lineup, one ancestor will have a different adaptive story, a different piece of the human puzzle that it added, let’s say, than a later ancestor.

And of course, their story is our story.

It’s one thing to study the bones of these creatures and be able to make inferences about how they lived. But it takes you to a completely further place to actually build a face, and have something that looks like a real living, breathing being to represent these things. And I think it helps people to go all the way there in thinking of them as living beings.

Human imagination is really part of our creativity and as a species, we became very adept at imagining Plan B and Plan C. So, our options are not constrained to just one path that may fail. So, that creativity arose as a survival mechanism, I think and only late in human history, did it start blossoming in forms like art and music.

The evolution of humans, the arrival of humans on the planet emerges as a really unique and fantastic event. And the human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself.