Lascaux Bulls
How can you create with the mastery and power of the ancients?
1. Have a strong source of inspiration. Go back to what makes it possible for you to eat, drink, live, and love. For them, it was the animal and the Mother Goddess. What is it for you?
Horses
2. Decorate where you find yourself.
3. Be abstract. Doodle. The European painters made abstract tectiforms (rectangles divided by lines) and claviforms (club-shapes). They made squiggles called macaroni in the soft clay. They left handprints.
Thought to be a woman’s handprint from Peche Merle in France.
4. Let the surface speak to you before you start. It’s possible the ancients saw the rock wall as a permeable spirit zone that would literally let sacred ancestors and animals through it when they painted. They definitely incorporated stalagmites, stalactites, bulges, and depressions into their work.
Peche Merle Spotted Horses. It has been shown genetically that there probably were spotted horses. Or… were the painters just having design fun?
5. Get your art immediately into public spaces with multiple images. Painted caves are “nuclei linked by galleries.” Don’t be afraid of galleries or large-scale public art!
Gallery Diagram. Talk about an Art Walk!
6. Don’t worry about light or light sources. Use what you have.
7. The deeper you go, the more interesting it gets.
From Santa Barbara, California. Chumash
8. Look up!
Baja, California. I’ve always wanted to see these.
An Ancient Digital Painter
9. Claim your ancestors and your lineage. Cave paintings and petroglyphs can show 10,000 years of successive paintings inscribed over previous images. Climb on the backs of other artists over time.Who are your people?
With a smile from Suzanne Edminster
To see my “handprint”, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGD970yqBTI.
Caerus Art Residency 
LOVE your digital painter!!! And I love the questions, too. I guess I was born to write questionnaires – or maybe it’s all those tests and quizzes during my teaching career. In any case, I see guidelines to notice as I move forward. #5 interests me, especially since marketing takes up a significant amount of time and energy. There are so many places “out there”, I need to weed THAT garden.
This has been such a juicy experience for me! Thank you!
Oh Karen, I think your reply is below in the string!
I love these — reminds us that we are part of the cave art tradition, that we carry these imperatives forward. I particularly gravitate to number 4 — “Let the surface speak to you before you start.” Surface sensibility is so essential for the connection with the painting process.
On a personal note, I have spent various amounts of time sitting in front of and looking through the metal grate at the “Painted Cave” in Santa Barbara — indeed a place filled with the sense of mystery, one with which one must take care.
Research is showing that abstract ur-marks of hominids go back up to 100, 000 years. We like circles and checkerboard patterns a lot. And dots. You are lucky to have visited this location. I have never seen it. My most recent trip to petroglyphs can be seen at http://saltworkstudio.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/my-desert-vacation-2-petroglyphs-and-premonitions/. I’ve visited petroglyphs all over the western USA and one European painted cave in Sicily.
This is an easy place to visit — just upside the foothills of Santa Barbara, on the slant of “Painter Cave Road.” There are other Chumash painted caves and petroglyphs, but their locations are guarded secrets among a vigilant group of scholars and admirers. The Getty museum has also helped with their preservation. A great book about the art of the Chumash Indians is “Rock Paintings of the Chumash: a Study of a California” by Campbell Grant.
I enjoyed doing this as a mildly humorous thought piece. I don’t know the attribution of the laptop in cave painting, but will look it up and post it. The “marketing monster” is on many artist’s mind right now… perhaps lurking in closets and caves. We cannot do it all. I think it’s important to pick one line of authentic marketing trail and follow it. Perhaps marketing could be called “hunting” in the cave metaphor! or “tracking”! To follow this metaphor, hunting is important, but doesn’t really touch the totemic spirit of the animal (the cave painting). One is temporal, the other eternal. The long view again…
Got to put a link to this wonderful post in my next newsletter! Thanks for taking the time to enlighten.
Thanks, Susan! You are one of my fellow travelers on this path. We would be holding hands as we descended deeper into the cave galleries!
Take me too!
I love this article Suzanne, you know it resonates with me. I would only disagree with number 5, about getting your art in public places. For I think these cave drawings were often deep in caves where the average person never went. They were a more personal experience or spiritual connection. So i would say rule number 5 should be Do it for yourself, from your spirit, and the world will (eventually) find it’s brilliance.
O, you are the brilliant one! Thanks, Caren. I may well revise this…