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) Art1. Petroglyphs carvings into stone surfaces

2. Petroforms art made by aligning or piling natural stones

3. Pictographs  rock and cave paintings

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:• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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

2. Circle

3. Claviform

4. Cordiform

5. Crosshatch

6. Cruciform

7. Cupule

8. Dot

9. Fan-Shape

10. Finger Fluting

11. Half-Circle

12. Hand Stencil

13. Handprint

14. Line

15. Open-Angle

16. Oval

17. Pectiform

18. Penniform

19. Quadrangle

20. Reniform

21. Scalariform

22. Serpentiform

23. Spiral

24. Tectiform

Triangle

25. Unciform

(No Picture)

Means "hook-shaped" in Latin. Also referred

to as "crochet" (French for "hook-

shape").

26. W-sign (No Picture)

"cursive w-signs", these newly-defined

W-symbols are shaped exactly as

they sound.

27. 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