About the artwork

Bison 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.   Bison spotlights an enigmatic bison transcending over a melange of scores of the original ceiling animal images in Northern Spain's Altamira Cave.  Arresting, steady, and upright, he shines among those galloping or wallowing in grounded fetal positions.  My re-creation further electrifies his radiance with a striking contrast between velvety red ochres, cabernet reds, and violets against a yellow ochre stone-like stuccoed background, used in all of my parietal interpretations to mimic the uneven surface and cauliflower texture of the original limestone caves.  Stylized threads of cracks incised in the stucco with a box cutter and woven in and out of the body affect natural stresses of the limestone walls.  Framing techniques for the bison of a golden white body halo and renderings in four corners (clockwise from top left: bison hind, wallowing bison, and receding bottom ledges) evoke an enshrinement and honor the shaman artist's possible intentions.  Cultural experts hypothesize that the cave's works were part of rituals to contact otherworldly spirits.  If so, the beauty of such a mighty beast was likely the chief channel.  All of my Cave Art pieces can play as a contrast and/or statement piece in minimalist environs or blend in well is 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 Landscapes series.