The Primitive Artist

Forty thousand years ago the first evidence of the creative nature of humans begins to be preserved. The motivation must have been great to inspire these early artists to walk into a dark cave with their stone lamps filled with animal grease and a flickering flame, and attempt to capture the essence of the prehistoric animals that they saw and hunted on the walls of their caves. The animals in this painting, are based on images found on the walls of the Altamira, the Chauvet and the Lascaux caves.

I have used a great deal of artistic license with the time line in this piece. The first minor discrepancy is that neither my cat, nor myself, are even close forty thousand years old when some of these caves were painted. A somewhat larger stretch was including my great-great-grandmother, some ten million times removed, ‘Plesiadapis’. Plesiadapis was a little smaller than a cat, and it is one of the earliest known primate like mammals, and possibly an early ancestor to the human race. It lived in North America and Europe between 55 and 58 million years ago.

I have often wondered if my cat would seek revenge for being tossed out into a snowstorm, if I was smaller than it, and I still looked somewhat like a rodent.

This painting has participated in the following International Exhibits;
“REAL?” ICO Gallery, New York, NY, USA 2008
An International Presentation of Portfolios, the Staedelschule, Frankfurt, Germany 2006