human roots and frivolous art

Panel of the lions, Chauvet Cave, France 27k to 32k years ago

I'm 40. I think I have been drawing since I could hold a pencil. What I've been interested in creating has changed over the years, but the impulse to use a tool to represent from my mind, from reality something -- anything -- really has not changed at all. I'm not musical, but I can imagine it is the same for people who need to sing or play an instrument. Or to dance. Maybe it is a similar impulse to birds needing to sing. Creating something to bring attention to how you see the world.

I'm thinking of this because I found some old drawings of mine and my daughter's this morning. I can hold them, examine them and the moment from when they were made feels fresh and immediate. So, maybe the impulse is to record the moment, create a memory. Polariods. Kodachrome.

impulses of a mother and daughter

I'm a Montessori teacher and one of the benefits of my job is I get to watch children create art everyday. I'm doubly blessed in that I get to work with children from 2 years to 5th grade and I can watch how that creation manifests through out the developmental process. The subjects change. The feelings about the finished work change, but I wonder if that which drives the person to make art changes all that much. I don't even know if the impetus is definable... it seems like it comes from somewhere pre-verbal, somewhere before the need for grammar or labels. I do know often children are driven to make art before they can manage a complete a sentence (or even words in some cases).

Recently, I learned about Chauvet Cave in Southern France. The discovery of this cave pushed back our reckoning of the earliest known representative art by human beings, with the belief of archeologists being that some of the paintings could have been done as early at 32 thousand years ago. There were Neanderthals roaming around Europe at that time, competing for scarce food. There was an ice age going on. Lions, hyenas, bears and wolves were trying to eat the people. The people were trying eat the deer, boars and aurochs (who really didn't want to be eaten and made those humans work really hard for their supper.) There was no agriculture, no cities, probably not even anything resembled even a village. There may have been as few as 1000 humans total in Europe and Asia. Life was seriously hard and dangerous. And still people wanted to go paint in caves.

That is a powerful impulse.

Growing up, I was led to believe, both implicitly and directly, that making art was sort of frivolous. Even a waste of time.

I can't believe that to be true now. Our human urge to create art was so strong it found expression even when humanity was on the brink of extinction, when the average human life span might have been as young as 10 years old. In fact, I believe it is possible that art is how humans survived -- the evolutionary advantage. Expression, bonding together, finding inspiration in the creations of others and showing a view of reality that transcends or transforms disappointment, brutality and fear.