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Gallery Gets Elemental With Cave Paintings
Visual Design and Web Media student Chris Heckman
learned there are adjustments to be made when leaving the computer
keyboard behind and taking up the tools of prehistoric cave painters.
“The ‘canvas’ is concrete board
with limestone on top of it to simulate the texture of cave walls,”
Heckman explains. “I rubbed my fingers raw the first time
I painted on it.”
Heckman was one of eight students who took Dr.
James Walker’s Prehistoric Art class. The art they made using
only the tools and technology available to the original cave painters
was displayed in a Cave Paintings exhibition at Ferris State’s
Rankin Center Gallery.
Gallery Coordinator Carrie Weis-Taylor herself
took the class and had two paintings in the exhibition.
“All of the images we reproduced are from
actual caves,” Weis-Taylor said, “including the famous
Lascaux cave.”
These early artists were doing more than just
drawing stick figures, although the Lascaux paintings were produced
about 15,000 years ago and other work is more than twice as old.
Some caves have images that are carved as well as painted, and the
perspective of the work can be quite sophisticated.
Walker has traveled to study important cave paintings
in Niaux and Bedilac, France. He began experimenting with creating
his own cave art using only those methods available to prehistoric
artists.
“I worked at a research academy in France,”
Walker said. “I’m not an artist myself, but what I teach
is how to mix pigments and so on.”
He also fashioned some of the equipment students
used, in addition to their fingers, to reproduce the striking images
of animals including horses, ibex, bison and even rhinoceroses.
“The horsehair brushes were held together
with deer tendon, which is the same way ancient hunters fastened
sharpened stone points to spears,” Walker noted. “We
did everything exactly as the cave painters did it.”
Even if that meant students working their fingers to the bone.
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