The Never Ending Story

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Aurochs, Horse and Deer Cave Painting Lascaux, France

Painters are storytellers. The earliest paintings humans have discovered reveal this. Twenty-thousand years ago (give or take), there was a very successful hunt. Those folks, in that time, hunted big game on foot with spears. The engagement could have easily meant death for some of the people involved, or they might come away without a kill, or both. So the stakes were very high.

We will never know for sure why historic cave paintings depicting the hunt were created, but one interpretation is this: so good was this event, that the tribe decided to memorialize it with a series of large-scale wall paintings. Using stick figures for the hunters, but anatomically accurate renderings of the animals, one, or several of the tribe together, created what we now know as the fabulous Lascaux cave paintings. We don’t know whether the goal was to simply recall the glory of this important event or to serve as a way to instruct…