Leonora Carrington’s long career as a painter has celebrated the mystery and mythology of animals both real and imaginary.
Leonora Carrington’s totem animal, and the animal most commonly seen in her work, is a white horse. Carrington is an example of a female artist who identified strongly with animals, and used them constantly in her work throughout her career. Creatures both real and imaginary populate her canvases in great numbers.
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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.
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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.
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