Transcript Yellow Horse Prehistoric Cave Art

Yellow Horse
Prehistoric Cave Art
4th Grade
Art Smart
Cave Art
Rock or Cave art can help us understand more about the ways of our early
ancestors, such as how they hunted and ate, how they viewed and
understand the world around them.
3 Kinds of Cave (Rock) Art
1. Petroglyphs
carvings into stone surfaces
3. Pictographs
rock and cave paintings
2. Petroforms
art made by aligning or piling natural stones
Pictographs
• Pictographs are rock and cave paintings
• The most spectacular examples of Pictographs have been discovered in
Spain and France, where archeologists have found around 350 caves
containing Paleolithic artworks.
• One of the most famous examples is Lascaux cave in southwestern France.
• Other decorated caves have been found in many parts of the world,
including Africa, Argentina, Australia, India and China.
Lascaux
• Lascaux is the setting of a complex of caves in southwestern France ,
famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings .
• These paintings are estimated to be 17,300 years old.
• They primarily consist of images of large animals, most of which are known
from fossil evidence to have lived in the area at the time.
What was life like 17,000 yrs ago?
 People lived together in groups or clans
 Hunters & Gatherers
 Animal Skins = clothes, blankets, shoes, partitions, shelter
 Animal Bones = tools and weapons
They did NOT have:
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Reading
Writing (as we know it)
Schools
Farming
Plumbing (toilets, sinks, showers, bathtubs)
Electricity (NO Computer, TV, phone, electric lights)
BUT THEY DID MAKE ART!
drawing, painting, sculpture, song, dance, body adornment
How Did They Do It?
• TORCHES: Without any natural light, these works were created with the aid of
torches or stone lamps filled with animal fat.
• SCAFFOLDING: Artificial holes in the walls suggest that wooden scaffolding was
used, to allow the artists to reach ceilings and high walls.
• PIGMENTS:
1. Different colored stones were gathered and ground into powder between
two rocks.
2. The powder was mixed with animal fat, vegetable oil, blood, or spit to
create paint.
3. Archaeologists have also uncovered solid blocks of pigment, which were
used by the cave artists in the same way you use crayons.
Tools For Painting
• Artists likely painted with their fingers first and later used tools like pointed sticks,
bone, moss or brushes made of animal hair, feathers or vegetable fiber.
• Prehistoric Paintbrush Kit Example (right)
1. Brush = horse hair inserted into a hazel wood shaft and
bound with plant fiber cord and tree resin glue
2. Brush = a goose feather replaces the horse hair
3. Brush = yucca leaves
(although this would not have been used during European
prehistory, there they were used extensively by Native
American Indians, such as Chumash and Miwok tribes)
4. Leather pad that would have likely been filled with damp
moss
• They also used spray painting techniques, by spitting out the mixed paint from their
mouths and even using reeds or specially hollowed bones - saliva acts as a binder.
Pictograph Figures
• Lascaux cave contains nearly 2,000
figures
• Figures are grouped into three main
categories — animal, human and
abstract symbols.
• The most frequently painted
animals are horses.
• The horses had larger heads on
thick necks, long tails, and their
manes stood up like a stiff brush.
• The most famous is a yellow mare,
known as the “Chinese Horse”
because of its similarity to the
related horses in Chinese paintings.
Yellow Horse
(Chinese Horse, Yellow Mare)
Which pigment colors can you
see in this painting?
Yellow,
black
and
red
The white was the original calcite covering over the cave rock and this artist has artistically
used the natural white background to create a light underside to this horse.
• The horse is drawn with a BLACK contour line (outline)
• Its body is painted in with YELLOW ochre (golden yellow).
• RED ochre is used for the strange symbols that surround the drawn horse.
• The stubby, upright black mane has been painted using a technique of
blowing the powdered pigment through small hollow bones, similar to
modern air-spray methods of painting.
28 Prehistoric Abstract Signs and Symbols appear repeatedly all through the Paleolithic world,
over 25,000 years of time - from 35,000-10,000BC.
1. Aviform
7. Cupule
2. Circle
8. Dot
13.
Handprint
14.
Line
19.
20.
Quadrangle
Reniform
Triangle
25.
Unciform
(No Picture)
3. Claviform
15.
Open-Angle
21.
Scalariform
Means "hook-shaped"
in Latin. Also referred
to as "crochet"
(French for "hookshape").
9. Fan-Shape
16.
26. W-sign
(No Picture)
Oval
4. Cordiform
22.Serpentiform
10.
Finger Fluting
17.
27.
Pectiform
23.
5. Crosshatch
11.
Penniform
24.
6. Cruciform
12.
Spiral
Half-Circle
18.
Hand Stencil
"cursive w-signs",
these newly-defined
W-symbols are
shaped exactly as
they sound.
Tectiform
Zigzag
More Lascaux Examples
Art Activity
Use brown craft or paper bag paper crumpled up & then
flattened out.
Lay tables on their sides and tape the brown paper on.
Students pick a game animal for their design.
Experiment with tools & pigments to create the picture.
Tear edges of paper to finish the look – can wet outline with a
wet brush to facilitate this.
Student Examples