Cupules are the earliest known and also the most common type of rock art.
They are hollows or cups, hemispherical petroglyphs created by percussion.
Cupules have been found on every continent inhabited by humans.
Here is one article I found about cupules in
Chile: 'Tacitas or Cupules'. It may be interesting to learn more about them.
Painting Exercise Nr. 1 (Online Art Class):
Prehistoric Cave Painting
Everybody is welcome to participate and share their experience.
For this exercise we want to practice painting within the confines of a prehistoric painting system.
We will paint with a limited palette of colors, as they were used by stone-age painters in the cave of Lascaux.
Only use black, yellow and red ochre.
The painting surface could be grey, white, or beige.
You could light your workspace with a candle (or any light that resembles natural fire), warm, yellowish/red (flickering).
Paint your dog, cat or bird, or any animal you can find - from life. Focus on creating the black outline.
Concentrate on what you feel when you look at the animal.
Do not attempt to do more than finding the form (using black color or charcoal).
At the end of the last ice-age some of the most magnificent paintings were created that have survived in underground caves.
The cave of Lascaux is one of the best known. Only natural earth pigments were used. Blue pigments were not known yet. Green? Even though it exists in natural form it was not used either.
Lascaux colors and painting techniques:
"Pieces of colored stones were found in the cave, some may have been used to draw directly onto the walls.
Manganese Oxide - a black mineral naturally present in the cave, sharpened to a point produces a thick black line.
Ochre, clay dyed red or yellow by iron oxide. There are numerous such deposits in the region. Prehistoric man used neither blue nor green.
White, despite it's ready availability at Lascaux was not used either. Yellow ochre produced colors from pale yellow to bright brown.
Red ochre to orange to violet. Manganese oxide depending on it's density gave grey browns, metallic greys or jet black.
Many animals are monochrome or painted in two colors, yellow and black, or red and black.
Quadrangular signs group the main colors of the Lascaux palette:
red, yellow and black. Spitting, blowing through a hollow stick, scratching into the rock, or drawing directly onto the wall with rocks, as well as brushes or sticks made from rolled up hide."
Chauvet Cave
Chauvet Cave - this is the oldest known cave which contains prehistoric cave paintings - twice the age of Lascaux.
Egg tempera is a wonderful painting medium. I painted the painting below many years ago and the colors are unchanged as if they had been applied yesterday.
I would not recommend to paint on canvas, but here, because it was one of my first attempts at egg tempera painting, I used canvas.
Accidentally the acrylic ground held the egg tempera color very well. I moved a few times and finally cut the canvas from the frame and stored it flat.
So if you happen to have canvas which has the right kind of tooth or surface structure, you can very well paint with egg tempera on it, as long as you store it flat or frame it behind glass.
A REGION AT THE FRONT OF THE BRAIN 'LIGHTS UP'
when we experience beauty in a piece of art or a musical excerpt, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Beauty is in the Medial Orbio-Frontal Cortex of the Beholder
"The study, published July 6 in the open access journal PLoS One, suggests that the one characteristic that all works of art, whatever their nature, have in common is that they lead to activity in that same region of the brain, and goes some way to supporting the views of David Hume and others that beauty lies in the beholder rather than in the object."
"However, particularly interesting was that activity in another region, the caudate nucleus, found near the centre of the brain, increased in proportion to the relative visual beauty of a painting. The caudate nucleus has been reported previously to correlate with romantic love, suggesting a neural correlate for the relationship between beauty and love."
Going Quantum
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The Barn
A place to use in summer.
Inside the old horse stable.
Dad helping with renovations.
The swallow nest under the ceiling.
This is a picture of the inside of the nest -
1 egg and 3 newly hatched young.
A source of information:
The Internet Archive
Archive of historical collections that exist in digital format.
Living in southern California's dry and sunny climate has a significant impact on how I paint today.
I grew up in Germany, moved to Berlin after highschool, spent a year in southern France, moved to L.A. Back in Germany right now.
Eggtempera painting allows me to work on larger paintings over a longer period of time.
It's like weaving a fabric of color, form and thought. A composition really, similar to music, where one tries to create a symphony from the various elements that make up a painting.
There are recognizable elements, but my images are abstractions.
I started to use oil for smaller, more spontaneous work.
