Lascaux

"Lascaux - Group Work by Young Artists" with Sirce Kwai Giveon

 Time Inversion

The Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach hired me to teach Digital Art to 7-11 year olds. My lessons were prepared in April for the late July week of classes. A week before the class began, a snag in the computers left me toolless. 

Without enough time to purchase supplies, I hit the dirt. There is a baseball field behind the Center so with bucket in hand, my supplies dropped in like the sands of time. 

The theme of the week was "The Language of Art". So I started where visual language began: The cave walls of Lascaux and Chauvet. 

An art lesson taught to artistically gifted students has to have grit to it or quickly lose your audience. My homework involved library book research, hunting for rocks and buying eggs.

Presentation of information spanned Humans history by using the  library’s laptop for cave art analysis. The students kids begin to became as amazed as I was by the mastery of animal painting done without notes or sketches. We discussed the colors and materials used in cave art.  

Then came the rocks. These palm sized rocks are the local coral/limestone based sedimentary rocks that Rock Hounds call “Cheese”. It’s considered a disrespectful nickname. But I think that throwing nasty names at stones can make them roll. In the class, they pounded.

A period of ten minutes needed to be announced to the other classes to put their hands to their ears to muff the sound caused by the rocks pounding the sidewalk chalk (also pretending to be rock pigment) into powder. 

After the ten, the eggs cracked. 

Deftly separating the white from the yolk, the students experimented which of the two would preserve the powdered pigment better. By class vote, they chose the yolk. That was my choice as well. 

The backing for the cave wall was regular cardboard. Upon that cardboard was bunched up brown paper attached by glue.

 Now…here was the surprise for me. Normally I know that boys like to make messes. But it was the girls who were on the floor with the baseball field sand and a gallon of glue, mushing and shoving the glued dirt with glee. They occasionally reared up to show me how the glued dirt reached their elbows. 

This may have solved the mystery of  who were the first artists.