About the artwork

The Great Black Cow is part of my six-work Cave Art series that aims to resurrect the primal power and beauty of scenes from caves of the Upper Paleolithic Era, or Late Old Stone Age: Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc (30,000 B.C.) in France, Lascaux ((15,500 B.C.) in France, and Altamira (14,500 B.C.) in Spain.  Cro-Magnon shaman artists fashioned reverential masterworks of the lives, movements, and spiritual energy of the animals of their worlds.   The Great Black Cow shows the Lascaux Cave image of a black cow dominating horses wandering in the background.  The shaman artist painted her with horsehair brushes in pigment made of pulverized manganese rock and bone marrow.  Flint and bone tools incised white lines from the limestone; her white stucco texture -- the base of all my mixed media interpretations of the parietal images to affect the uneven surface and cauliflower texture of the original limestone caves -- pops up from under my oil paint, as can be seen in the close-up detail image in the gallery here.  The shaman blew paint from inside hollowed bones to create sprinkling; here, cloth pats of paint delicately laced colors over a solid surface.  Varied colors on the cow's back suggest peeling paint.  To enrich the palette of the original stone's browns and ochres, I blended in tones of olive, salmon, and bright orange.  Each of my cave art pieces can play as a contrast and/or statement piece in minimalist environs or blend in well in rustic Western settings.   During my re-creation process while in my own “cave” during the COVID lockdowns, I discovered that the works seemed very contemporary in aesthetic. The shamans used – perhaps even invented – abstract visual language; they coalesced composition, color, texture, line, shape, form, patterns, and symbols, as evidenced here in the close-up detail image with the patterning of squares at black cow's feet.  (That splash of purple is also genius!) While the images are technically old, they also seem current because contemporary art has embraced abstract art techniques. As does my Cave Art series by extension, making them perfect fits under the umbrella motif of my works here, Ancient is Modern, Modern is Ancient, which also includes my Goddess Eternal and Southwest Landscape series.