About the artwork

The Black Stag 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 Black Stag re-creates an enigmatic, powerful image from the Lascaux Cave of a truly magnificent stag of the Paleolithic era. A 1,500-pound stag flaunts the largest antlers ever known -- 12 feet in diameter and 90 pounds.  In the shaman's stylized rendering, colossal crowns with strange tines arch backward to heighten the body's curves and create forward movement.  A distorted eye, looking back, and reddish exhales suggest fear and fury as he charges away.  Although the shaman drew the stag with black charcoaled wood, I chose an understated chocolate set against a dignified palette of stone, creams, and yellows.  Gold leaf affects a precious metal embedded in the original rock, a final touch for this regal animal, now extinct in reality but living forever in art.  In all of my mixed media interpretations of the parietal images, a stucco base mimics the uneven surface and cauliflower texture of the original limestone caves.  The 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. 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.