30,000 B.C. Redux: Charging Lionesses Painting

"Charging Lionesses" is one work of my cave art series that resurrects primeval art. To express my love of animals, nature, and ancient cultures, my pieces re-interpret the primal power and beauty of scenes from prehistoric caves in France and Spain. Most of the works in the series were fashioned while in my own "cave" during COVID lockdowns and an 11-month-long isolating illness. This particular piece re-creates one section of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave (30,000 B.C.) in southern France. The original Cro-Magnon shaman artists brilliantly coalesced the elements of abstract visual language -- composition, color, texture, line, shape, form, and pattern in their simplest expressions -- to fashion reverential masterworks of the lives, movements, and spiritual energy of the animals of their world. They used horsehair brushes to draw lines and color figures with paints created from pulverized rock mixed with bone marrow. Flint and bone tools were employed to incise white lines from the limestone cave surface. They blew paint from inside hollowed bones to create sprinklings. They strategically placed images in places that enhanced the three-dimensions of an animal's body, i.e. a shoulder or hind of an animal on a natural rock protrusion. My techniques are more technologically modern. Brushes. Tube paints of various colors. Cloth pats of paint to delicately lace colors over a solid surface. A stucco base affects the uneven surface and cauliflower texture of limestone caves. Gesso-covered stucco texture pops out from under colored oil paints to replicate the shaman's incision process. "Charging Lionesses" is a real statement piece due to its dimensions and the explosive raw animal energy of a pride of lionesses rushing to kill bulls an cows (not shown). Choosing a flatter, smoother light ochre- and cream-colored portion of the limestone wall to draw the scene, the shaman artist overlaid bodies and lines to create perspective and evoke the pack's density and powerful forward surge. To lend a more contemporary flair, I chose blue-grey and muted cerulean colors to line and shadow the figures. Framing is not recommended as it would hide the stucco spillover on the sides from the creative process, though sides have been painted in creamy light yellow ochre for a finished effect. Comes with hanging hardware. Shipping could take longer than anticipated because the box must be specially ordered.