Charles Kritzon

Why Did Our Ancestors spend valuable time and resources making beads and ornaments, pigments and paintings when these activities would not feed, clothe or shelter them?
What were the cultural, social or traditional reasons driving them to create these unique items?

Primarily I am an educator of how Ancient Peoples successfully related to their world through the creation of material culture items that today we call art.

My classes and the art I make today seeks to give modern peoples a chance to re-connect to their ancient roots via Ancestral Arts. Using only the tools and materials that ancient peoples had available to them from the natural world, I not only explore how they made these unique cultural items but most importantly, why.

For over 30 years, I have been studying how ancient hunter-gatherer cultures successfully lived in harmony with the land. In the process I have mastered the fundamental primitive technologies of creating fire by friction, stone tool production, making string and rope from wild plant resources and how ancestral peoples enlivened their worlds with sound, music, color and ornament utilizing only resources from their natural environment.

Please come by and visit my studio to see many of the ancient materials and techniques I use to re-create these ancient works of art and culture. Every visitor, young and old, will have the opportunity to make and take home not only an original art object, but the amazing story it has to share.