Our arrival into Santander yesterday has coincided with a colossal Atlantic weather system. Up and down the Northern coast the country is being hammered by ten metre swells, winds up to 100km in strength and heavy flooding. We decide to go underground and catch a bus to one of the most famous cave art sites in the world, Altamira.
Picasso famously stated that, ‘after Altamira everything is decadence’. Sadly but necessarily the original caves are closed to visitors. However, we are treated to a very accurate reconstruction of the famous gallery of buffalo. What struck me most about these paintings was how accurate the drawings were and that this was not just because of the artists’ skill but also their absolute knowledge and understanding of the animal subjects. Successfully understanding and depicting the anatomy, movement, behaviour and perhaps most importantly the jizz of an animal as these artists inherently did, evokes an essence or spirit of nature that I have come to see as the most accurate or real ingredient in a wildlife painting, no matter how or when it is rendered.
What I think Picasso meant about art after Altamira is that whilst context has moved on, the function of art has not changed since these first ochre sketches. Cave paintings transform rock into something the artist and his society values, so the artist/hunter evokes the wildlife that sustains his people or perhaps represented fertility beliefs.
Today our values may be different but the inherent function of art to evoke nature, whether as a reflection of the external environment or our own internal nature has not changed. Most important of all, when art succeeds it does so because it brings real sensations into existence, in exactly the same way that painting animals onto rock would, for our ancestors at Altamira, bring those animals to life.
Picasso famously stated that, ‘after Altamira everything is decadence’. Sadly but necessarily the original caves are closed to visitors. However, we are treated to a very accurate reconstruction of the famous gallery of buffalo. What struck me most about these paintings was how accurate the drawings were and that this was not just because of the artists’ skill but also their absolute knowledge and understanding of the animal subjects. Successfully understanding and depicting the anatomy, movement, behaviour and perhaps most importantly the jizz of an animal as these artists inherently did, evokes an essence or spirit of nature that I have come to see as the most accurate or real ingredient in a wildlife painting, no matter how or when it is rendered.
What I think Picasso meant about art after Altamira is that whilst context has moved on, the function of art has not changed since these first ochre sketches. Cave paintings transform rock into something the artist and his society values, so the artist/hunter evokes the wildlife that sustains his people or perhaps represented fertility beliefs.
Today our values may be different but the inherent function of art to evoke nature, whether as a reflection of the external environment or our own internal nature has not changed. Most important of all, when art succeeds it does so because it brings real sensations into existence, in exactly the same way that painting animals onto rock would, for our ancestors at Altamira, bring those animals to life.
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