About the artwork

Facing Horses 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.   Facing Horses showcases profiles of equine dignity from the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave. Shamans lined and shadowed the proud horses and a background horse’s hind with charcoaled burnt wood; I used a purplish black oil paint. The choice of the original cave location capitalizes on the stone’s natural cracks for a design effect, here created with incisions in the stucco base. I emboldened the original rock hues of ochre and rust with an abstracted mélange of shapes in a calico of colors – white, celery, buttery yellow, brown, caramel, and cream. In all of my mixed media interpretations of the parietal images, a stucco base affects 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 Landscapes series.