Author Archives: Christopher Agostino

Ancient Origins – Chauvet Lions Watching

© 2004 Christopher Agostino “Chauvet Lions Watching”

“Before we ever painted on a cave wall we painted on ourselves.”

It’s a line I’ve used ever since the book The Painted Body  by Michel Thévoz (1984) introduced me to the idea that painting ourselves was the first human art. He states that it is the fundamental human art: “…there is no body but the painted body, and no painting but body painting.”

In my desire to reach back to that initial impulse to paint ourselves, I collect images of cave wall paintings and other ancient art. Cave paintings bring animals to life in naturalistic and stylized imagery that use the outcroppings and shapes of the rock walls, in much the same way body artists use the contours of the human form. Much of this prehistoric art depicts human/animal transformations associated with what scholars think may be the shamanist beliefs of early human cultures.

In The Mind in the Cave (2002), David Lewis-Williams  presents a timeline of the development of ancient art and culture. Whereas cave paintings go back 30,000+ years and the earliest “object of art” yet discovered is from 77,000 years ago, there is evidence of pigment processing from much earlier, possibly as far back as 250,000 years ago. That reaches back to the very beginnings of human culture on the plains of Africa, before the modern human race began to spread into the rest of the world. Pigments like those ochre earths are still used as traditional body paints.

When the Paleolithic paintings in the Chauvet Cave were discovered in 1994 they revolutionized our perception of prehistoric art. Before then, cave paintings were dated based on a study of style: the simpler the art the earlier it must be from. Modern scientific dating techniques show that some of the Chauvet  paintings are from 32,000 years ago, the earliest pictorial art we’ve ever discovered. Yet they are rendered with subtle shading, employ complex pigment processing, and varied illustrative techniques including using multiple images to depict movement (in almost a cubist fashion). Some have such a developed naturalistic style that they look like they could walk off the cave wall today.

I did this bodypainting called “Chauvet Lions Watching” in 2004, with images from European cave paintings that are 10,000 to 32,000 years old. I could call it my first fine art bodypainting — though I had painted full bodies before this, those were usually on assignments for clients, experiments with technique or imitations of other bodyart I’d seen. I think this was the first time I ever approached a body as a canvas to express and explore a strong concept I was trying to understand, with the specific goal of creating a single photograph that might be seen as a work of art.

The Chauvet Lions are watching from the lower right hand corner and, remarkably, they are the oldest image here.

Check out the related post:  Werner Herzog – he likes the lions, too.      http://wp.me/p1sRkg-6O   4/22/11

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Easter Bunny Breakfast in the Year of the Rabbit

a new idea for today's Breakfast with the Easter Bunny

A couple of us painted at the annual Breakfast with the Easter Bunny at Macy’s Herald Square store this morning. Here’s a few bunny faces from that, and from a Chinese New Year’s event I painted at back in January celebrating the Year of the Rabbit.

basic bunny

a design based on a specific Chinese Opera face, which had that very cute bunny design on the mouth

a hawk, I guess in case there are too many bunnies

Werner Herzog – Cave of Forgotten Dreams — he likes the lions, too. –

Cave of Forgotten Dreams — documentary film by Werner Herzog

30,000 year old cave painting from the Chauvet Cave

detail of bodypainting titled "Chauvet Lions Watching"

In an interview on Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross asked Werner Herzog which one painting he had the strongest reaction to as he filmed inside the Chauvet Cave. After saying that it was the overall effect of the cave that moved him the most, he singled out the painting of the lions. Paraphrasing his description, it is of five lions stalking something, intently looking at something but we don’t know what they are looking at — and depicted with such a complete naturalism that we could think we are looking at living lions today. Yet, it is among the single oldest paintings ever made. The earliest pictorial images in all of human art. As moving and complex as any art ever created since. I understand how he feels about the lions.

I’m trying to think of another time when I heard of a project and had such an immediate reaction to just how perfect it is. Werner Herzog, given the chance to bring to us this story of what may be the origin of art, the origin of our humanity. He’s one of the most fascinating artists in the world, and here he is making a movie about this cave that has always fascinated me, and been a continual inspiration for my work since it was first discovered in the 90s and I read about it in my Natural History Magazine.

Go to the article from NPR on the film, and listen to the Fresh Air interview there — in addition to talking about the film, Herzog talks about a lifetime of making films that “stare into the abyss” of humanity ( “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” have both been on TV a bunch lately): http://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135516812/herzog-enters-the-cave-of-forgotten-dreams

Clip of the movie:

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2827853081/

Werner Hertzog speaks of having always been drawn to prehistoric art, fascinated about the idea of paintings being made so long ago and yet we still can feel the connection between the people that made them and ourselves. I share that feeling. I began to explore our earliest art as I sought to find the origins of bodyart. And the connection between painting ourselves and painting cave walls is undeniable, with, for example, in Chauvet Cave — as in so many others —  painted hands being used as stamps to create designs on the cave walls. From the start, though, what caught me most was the constant examples of how these ancient artists expertly used the shape of the cave walls in their paintings, in a way that seems to me the very essence of bodypainting. Speaking only as an artist here, the transference of images on the body to images on the sculptured surface of a cave wall seems a very direct step.

The need to show how the paintings work on the form of the walls explains why Herzog filmed this in 3D: “When I saw photos, it looked almost like flat walls — maybe slightly undulating or so. Thank God, I went in there without any camera a month before shooting. What you see in there is limestone, and you have these wildly undulating walls — you have bulges and niches and pendants of rock, and there’s a real incredible drama of information. The artists utilized it for their paintings. … So it was clear it was imperative to do this in 3-D, in particular, because we were the only ones ever allowed to film.”

There are a lot of videos about Werner and his work, including these two interview segments about this film, particularly fun because he is speaking so off the cuff: 

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