You enter the cave, walk through constrictions, crawl on hands and knees and come out, 100 yards later, into a dark room, a widening in the cavern walls, and see, if you point your lamp at them, some of the most beautiful animals ever drawn by human hand.
The very first art – maybe 20,000 years old – is some of the best, and what you have are pictures of animals. On the walls at Lascaux and Altamira in Europe, you find bison and elk, aurochs and rhinoceroses. When you find people drawn on the cave walls, they are hardly more than stick figures, but the animals are often so realistic you can identify them by genus and species.
Read the rest of this entry »
Both European and Native American Shamanic people, this power animal or totem symbolizes awakening the strong force of the unconscious.
Bear, the animal, in Europe and the Americas, is regarded with respect by Pagan people. The zenith of Bear’s power is in spring and summer. Bear hibernates in the cold months, allowing him or her access to the unconscious in order to blend intuition and instinct leading to attaining personal power.
Read the rest of this entry »
Animal painting offers great opportunities for the oil painter to explore oil painting techniques. This painting demonstration uses zebras’ stripes as a focal point.
Animal art, in this case, zebras, adds something extra to what would otherwise be an empty African landscape painting. The patterns on the zebras can be illustrated in the conventional way to build confidence in oil painting, but in this demonstration, the colours have been manipulated to offer an extra dimension.
Read the rest of this entry »
The seemingly now-separate categories of person and animal have never been stable, but medieval people lived in a shifty world of monsters, manifestations and muscaliets.
A law-breaking dog ‘confesses without torture’ and is hanged to deter other dogs from crime, a glacier is warned to desist its landslip activity and when it doesn’t is anathemized by the bishop, and a werewolf is arraigned but only in its human form.
Medieval people were commonly magical thinkers or, if you prefer, they lived within unstable cultural signs. They slipped easily between mental categories. For them a rose was not necessarily a rose even when its rose-ness seemed unarguable. Looking like a rose, smelling like a rose and behaving like a rose wasn’t enough. Roses did not merely stand in for other things, such as ‘love’ or ‘England’,—but could become other things.
Read the rest of this entry »
Centuries ago, human used painting to represent some conditions. Just like egypt, Maya, etc, between good and bad, they’re using animals. So what do the following creatures symbolize in paintings means, lets find out more deeper.
1. The bat
The bat is generally known as a symbol for the night. Furthermore, in the West it is a symbol of evil and is associated with vampires. But in China it symbolizes good luck and longevity. Bats were considered by the early Christians to be “birds of the Devil” because of their association with darkness and their similarity to rats. Read the rest of this entry »