Today marks the 30th anniversary of the discovery of Doctor Ross Dupont’s art, insofar as time can be used as an accurate way to measure the works of an artist who has yet to be born. Indeed, many Dupontists believe his birth is still many centuries in the future, and based on his style and subject matter, it’s expected he’ll be born around the Aleutian Islands. Not much else has been learned about his life. There is evidence that his art has been discovered several other times through history, but the people or groups who happened across his work either failed to recognize it for what it was, or never advertised it to a wide enough audience to perpetuate knowledge of it.
It’s not clear when and where Dupont’s first works (relative to his own timeline) were created, but one of his earlier masterpieces, The Pond of Swans, was ironically one of the most recently discovered. Found in a newly uncovered cave, The Pond of Swans was painted on a wall rich with Neanderthal works, and has been dated to 55,000 BC. The landscape, which measures 36 in. X 12 in., uses traditional pigments and minerals in its composition, and depicts a pond of swans surrounded by Autumnal foliage. It’s believed that Dupont painted the walls of the cave shortly after its last inhabitants abandoned it, though some suspect that it was Dupont’s presence, and the microbes he carried, that led to the cave’s previous occupants’ disappearances in the first place.
While certainly old, The Pond of Swans is by no means the most ancient of his pieces. Found at the bottom of the Helen Weller bore hole, The Yelling Man is embedded in pyroclastic stone and is made of carefully-assembled crystals, mostly amethyst. It depicts a man shouting toward the heavens in agony, though some scholars believe his expression is one of primal anger. In order to create this piece, Doctor Dupont would have needed to know that the borehole would someday exist, and would have needed to create the piece over 1.2 billion years ago when that particular section of bedrock was exposed.
It’s true that Doctor Dupont is well regarded as an artist, but some question the ethics of his meddling in the timeline. One of his still-life pieces, Scrambled Eggs at Dawn, was created by using a multitude of roof colors in the city of Boise, Idaho, and can only be seen with aerial photography. Somehow, Dupont was able to involve himself in the construction of every building in such a way that his art piece would emerge. Indeed, documents surviving from the Great Rebuild Era make mention of a pushy city planner who seemed overly focused on roof colors “for environmental purposes”.
These are by no means all of his works, and to date, nearly five dozen have been discovered and attributed to him, with some Dupontists believing there may yet be hundreds left to find. Whether you’re a fan or a critic, Doctor Dupont’s contributions to the world of art cannot be understated, and one day when he’s born, his life will be greatly celebrated.