Prehistoric Cave Art
a contemporary artist's personal response
Our Abandoned Cradle
Whilst painting the cliffs & overhanging rocks here in the Dordogne, a mute feeling of ... abandon & beginnings...vertiginous, wild places ...where our our ancestors once lived some thirty thousand years ago. A constant line of continuous inhabitation for many thousands of years. Now abandoned. Our abandoned cradle. ... our beginnings...homo sapiens sapiens
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'The Abandoned Cradle' (Sergeac, Dordogne), Watercolour. 43 x 36cm.© Adam Cope
Cliff in the Vézère Valley. The black stains contain manganese dioxide, which is the pigment used in cave paintings.
"It is not the natural surroundings that give rise the vision; on the contrary, it is the poetic vision that gives the landscape its concrete form. The spirit sustains the stone, rather than visa versa. The landscape doesn't function as the background or the physical setting of the narrative; it is something that is alive, something that takes on a thousand forms; it is a symbol and something more than a symbol: a voice entering into the dialogue, and in the end, is the principal character in the story. A landscape is not the more or less accurate description of what our eyes see, but rather the revelation of what is behind visible appearances. A landscape never refers to itself; it always points to something else, to some thing beyond itself. It is a metaphysic, a religion, an idea of man & the cosmos."
OCTAVIO PAZ - Landscape & the Novel in Mexico.
'Maison Troglodyte dans la Vallée de La Couze'
65 x 54 cm (25,5 x 21,3 inches approx)
Oil on Canvas
© the artist
'Maison Troglodyte' means literally a troglodyte's house, or a subterranean house built into a cliff-face. Troglodyte houses are typical of the Dordogne. They represent a continuity of inhabitation (or in-hut-ation, as I like to call it) which goes back at least 40 000 years, if not longer, going back to neanderthal times.
The above painting is of the next cliff on from La Gravette in the Couze valleyw which is a narrow, shallow valley, cut into the limestone. It was densely populated in prehistoric times. La Gravette was the archaeological eponymous site that gave the name to The Gravettian Period of human history, which spans some 6000 years, between 28 000 and 22 000 years ago. Huddled up against this south-west facing rock face, much colder than now during in the ice age, life must have been very different from modern comfort.
'La Maison Troglodyte- La Gravette, Dordogne'
Oil on Canvas
46 x 33 cm ( 18,2 x 13 inches)
© The Artist.
Many of the prehistoric sites in the Dordogne are still inhabited to this day. 28 000 years of continuous settlement. Some small changes (roads & cars apart) like the chickens picking away in the foreground & the pruning of the fruit trees (The Gravettian was pre-agriculture), the odd bit of metal (stone age not metal age), a square window, some faced stone (though I bet they spread hides down from the cliff face in the same manner as this tiled roof), but other than that, not much change. Sometimes, whilst painting quietly in these places, I imagine I can feel the continuity.