Artist’s First Glimpse of Indian Rock Art Hooked Him for Life

Thirty years ago, on a fishing trip to the San Rafael wilderness outside Santa Barbara, Campbell Grant peered into a long-abandoned Chumash Indian cave and glimpsed his future.

In zinfandel reds and chalk whites, pictographs of animals, celestial objects and medicine men danced across the cave walls, images that were old before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

“I was hooked,” the 79-year-old artist recalled. “I wanted to find the next one. They were being eroded and vandalized, and I wanted to save them for posterity.”

From that decisive moment came a lifelong passion for American Indian rock art and six books, including the 1965 classic, “Rock Paintings of the Chumash,” the first published work on the subject. It records pictographs from 62 coastal mountain sites between San Luis Obispo and Malibu, including many in Ventura County.

Grant’s three-decade quest culminated recently in a show of his painted renditions of Chumash rock art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The show, “Cave Paintings of the Chumash as Recorded by Campbell Grant,” runs through April 3 and is the first time in 24 years that the collection has been exhibited.

“Campbell is one of the grand old men of California rock art,” said Ken Hedges, chief curator of the San Diego Museum of Man. “He established the credibility of rock art studies as a legitimate scientific field.”

Although there is a growing interest in rock art--seminars with field trips are offered through UCLA’s extension program--much of the ground-breaking work was done by people like Grant. When he began his research in 1960, armed with grants from the National Science Foundation, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and an archeological research foundation, there were only 18 known Chumash rock art sites.

He finished the project in 1964 with a list of 80 sites--some depicting scenes up to 30 feet long. The 22 paintings on display at the Santa Barbara museum capture the most vibrant and reflect years of sleuthing in scrub forests and rock formations, remote hills and high desert.

Gun-Wielding Rancher

Grant pumped every source he could find, from local ranchers to forest rangers and hunters. He took two-day burro trips into the remote back country of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, hacking through the undergrowth with a machete to clear cave entrances. One time, he sweet-talked an ornery, gun-wielding rancher into letting him explore his property.

The sweat and toil paid off. At one particularly memorable site in the Santa Ynez Mountains, Grant found pestles sticking out of mortars used by the Chumash to grind acorns. It looked as if the Indians were coming back at any minute.

And Grant felt as Vasco Nunez de Balboa must have felt on first setting eyes on the great Pacific Ocean.

Because of disease, mistreatment of the Chumash by white settlers and invasion of their ancestral lands, the Indians’ culture today is virtually destroyed, Grant said. Although the Indians are embracing their heritage and working to preserve it, scholars say no one knows exactly how to interpret the cave art.

What is known is that the rock paintings, which are thought to be 500 to 2,000 years old, recorded significant cultural and sacred events, depicting shamans, animals, insects and celestial occurences.

Pleas for Fertility

Scholars believe that some paintings were ceremonial pleas to the spirit world for fertility or rain. Others may have recorded a kind of creation myth, and still others depicted vision-quests undertaken at puberty.

To acquire the bright colors needed for these paintings, the Chumash ground minerals such as limonite and hematite, and mixed them with water, animal fat or plant juice. Then they daubed the cave walls with elaborate narratives in yellow, white, black, red and blue-green paints.

The paintings remain, guarded closely by researchers reluctant to disclose their locations for fear of vandalism.

As far back as 1904, Santa Barbara residents installed a padlocked iron grille across the entrance to Painted Cave in the San Marcos Pass to deter graffiti artists, whose scribblings there date to 1887.

Grant still writes about and researches rock art at the Carpinteria hacienda-style ranch house where he has lived with his wife, Lou, since 1946. Her parents built the sprawling home with the ocean view and avocado orchards in 1919, and she has lived in it all her life.

As a child, in a foreshadowing of her life with Grant, she played in the nearby hills and found Indian artifacts buried in the earth.

What drew Grant to Indian rock art?

“It’s strange and enigmatic. It’s not anything that can be deciphered, and yet this rock art phenomenon is worldwide,” Grant said.

He grew up in Berkeley, inspired to a life of art by an uncle who painted pictures of sailing ships and an older brother who painted pictures of Southwest Indians. After high school, Grant studied painting at the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and the Santa Barbara School of the Arts.

In the 1930s, he worked on a federal WPA project painting murals, including one at Santa Barbara High School. From 1934 to 1946, Grant worked as an illustrator for Walt Disney Studios in Burbank on the movies “Fantasia,” “Pinocchio” and “Snow White.”

By 1946, he had begun a career illustrating books--mostly about Indians, archeology and anthropology. It is clear even from those early drawings that Grant’s interest was piqued by the enigmatic anthropoid figures that marched across continents, imprinting cave walls from France to Australia.

On the fateful 1959 fishing trip, a Sierra Club member told him offhandedly about a nearby cave that contained some Indian drawings--and thereby sparked his abiding passion for rock art.

While on reconnaissance expeditions, Grant takes detailed notes and slides, sketches the site and notes its longitude, latitude, elevation and significant nearby roads and markers such as trees.

Grant is pleased by the growing popularity of rock art, but his interests are not limited to Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.