Most people are familiar with television survival programs. In one series, a couple is placed in a hostile environment, nude, and without tools. They must survive a given period of time and simply survive.
In another series, the program will place a couple, usually men, in a remote area and their goal is to complete a travel from point A to point B and be picked up at point B by a given deadline. They, though, are provided tools, clothing, and basic materials to complete their trek.
My question to my art students would be: In a twelve hour day, can you estimate how many hours are spent each day searching for food, shelter, and/or water. Based on the television series, they generally would respond with an answer of eight to ten hours.
I would introduce my lesson on man’s earliest created art. The art was created by the cave people 40 to 10 thousand years BCE on cave walls. It depicted images of human and animal forms as well as plant life.
Next I would ask the students the same question I asked earlier: How many hours do you think was spent by this civilization searching for food, shelter and/or water. General answer was that it took them most of the day.
So my next point was to have the students consider this harsh living condition. If every member of a society had to contribute in gathering or acquiring the natural resources needed for survival, why then would someone spend most of their energy painting on cave walls. Many of these paintings were deep inside caves which may require a light source, fire. The paintings required other natural resources, pigments. Paint had to be created since there were no art stores or pre-mixed paints available. Also, how much time was required to create the pigments and complete the images?
Survival is paramount. Did the artist starve or did the community provide food and water and other resources. If the community provided the resources for survival why would they do this? Why is the art important to them? Was it used to communicate, document, seek an energy force, or unite them?
Why was this art so important to them? Does the art have a spiritual force or energy?
Whatever the reason, my belief is that this cave art was just as important to them as art is important to us, even in our modern times. Art records an account. Art celebrates, mourns, records, enlightens, mystifies, it questions our existence.
Can man, thorough art, reflect or attempt to capture the spirit, soul, the heart of matter around him?
Man, animals, wind, flowers, oceans, soil, are all forms of matter. Are artists attempting to share their awareness of these elements and their energy through art?
My instructions to my students was to try to illustrate this form of energy when they create images.
Allow the colors to speak for you, let the textures express the age, the stress, the physical structure of a given matter. Illustrate the world around you in a manner that communicates a message to others. Their understood message does not have to be in agreement with your thoughts but they do respond to what you are communicating. Give your art a level of importance, your spirit.