Cave Art

Cave Art

I find cave art fascinating because it is one of the only clues left from our earliest ancestors. We now know that the earliest humans were not these grunting, primitive apes but were intellectual and had a sense of aesthetics which was made apparent in the art left behind. They understood scale and proportions and that things farther away were smaller than things up close. They even created incredible air brush techniques by spitting chewed charcoal through a bamboo shoots like the images we see in the caves at Pech Merle.
It is hard for us to imagine how and why the need to create beautiful art was so important when mere survival was close to impossible but art is what they did whenever they had the chance. We have only a small fraction of the discovered cave paintings left in the world. Many have deteriorated naturally due to the organic material they used to create the images. The paintings that do survive are precious and usually sealed off from the general public due to the naturally occurring bacteria in our breath. These paintings are extremely fragile and yet they are as important to us today as they were to our early ancestors. The ability to create images must have seemed like magic to the clan or tribe that first set eyes on these finished works. Even though we may never know for certain why these images were created, sympathetic magic is one of the ruling theories with today's anthropologists especially since many of the animals portrayed in these images were not part of their diet.
Whatever the reason these images were created, they remain to this day a testimony for the need of art and how essential it is to the human psyche.
As long as there are humans, the arts will never die.

This image was made with copper leaf and glue. It is available on ebay. You can read the description here:

 http://www.ebay.com/itm/251582108930?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649