An artist must be creative in order to create a phenomenal cave art; creativity is the use of imaginations in order to create something. Cave painting is a type of parietal arts on the interior of a cave with depictions of animals, cave painting was the most common method of communication around the year 30,000 B.C.E. There were five different kinds of cave art such as hand prints like finger marks, abstract signs, creative painting, engraving and relief sculpture. According to statistics, 99 percent of cave paintings were animals such as lions, rhinoceroses, bears.
Human beings’ paints were exceptionally rare but abstract imagery such as signs, symbols and other kind of geometric markings were very common. Paleo-archaeologist (Lewis-Williams, 1995) discovered 32 most common used signs by our ancestors after she examined several caves around Europe where she started by creating a database of the geometric signs. These symbols included the asterisk, aviform, circle, claviform, cordiform, crosshatch, cruciform, cupule, dot, finger fluting, flabelliform, harf-circle, line, negative hand, open-angle, oval, pectiform, penniform, positive hand, quadrangle, reniform, scalariform, segmented cruciform, serpentiform, Spanish tectiform, spiral, tectiform, triangle, unciform, w-sign, y-sign and zigzag.
It is very difficult to tell the exact meaning of this symbols even though one can make some assumptions on various signs such as the negative and positive hand-mark meaning that a particular human being was here.
Cave painting consisted of three typical stages which varied significantly in accordance with the artists’ experience and also the cultural maturity, nature of the rock, strength and kind of light and the raw materials used.
The first stage is to draw an outline and the basic features of the exact thing which will be drawn by the artist on the cave wall where an artist can opt to outline using either coal or manganese or getting the uppermost layer of the rock using an acuminated stone.
The second stage is colouring or filling the drawing using red ochre or any other kind of pigment.
The third stage is shading the drawing using a black or any other pigment in order to advance its three-dimensionality, additional engraving or sculpting could also be relevant in boosting the volume and relief of the drawing. The stone-age painters used to make sketches before drawing, in cave of La Vache, archaeologists found a layer of charcoal under the black pigment of the paintings which showed that a sketch had been prepared before painting.
Archaeologist have not discovered the main reason of cave paintings even though the paleoanthropologists thought that the cave paintings were meant to decorate. Archaeologists have found enough evidence proving that ordinary people did not live in these painted caves but only by a small group of artists and other individuals who participated in cave ceremonial activities. Hence, it is now believed that cave painting was meant for cerebration reasons connected to supernatural, social or religious rituals. Pre-historic caves also consisted of sculptures such as the Venus of Laussel dated 23,000 B.C.E which is found in the Laussel rock shelter. Another example is the Tuc d’Audoubert Bison relief carvings dated 13,500 B.C.E found in Ariege (France).
Colour pigments were first used by the homo-sapiens-sapiens man through creating and mixing before drawing or creating a sketch. A 100,000 years old paint workshop was uncovered in the Blombos cave found in South Africa with several ochres, bones, charcoal, crushing-stones and also harmer-stones even though there was no proof of contemporaneous paintings. (Lewis-Williams, 1995) explained how rock shelters and stone-age caves consisted of a layer with reddish ochre with a height of 8 inches deep. The stone-age man improved their colour pigments more frequently since the first painting was a monochrome which was created by an earth and charcoal mixture which contained crude binder such as saliva or animal fat.
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