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How Art made the World
The gradual death of objectivity and impartiality in BBC’s news reporting is sometimes compensated by the fascinating documentaries it produces.
Just finished watching a part of the captioned series quite cleverly presented by Dr Nigel Spivey. What I loved the most was the reference that the program made to the discovery of pre-historic cave paintings in the twentieth century that led to the interesting postulate that humans have been indulging in and producing art for over 30,000 years.Â
The show also took us through the process that led to the creaton of pictures and how images might have resulted in civilizational changes in our common history…
Humans have always been fascinated by shapes of human body that are exaggerated and unrealistic. The documentary travelled across the Egyptian, Greek and Roman eras and traced the evolution of how the human form was conceived and presented by the artists.
Now with my recent dabbling in painting, such insights were extremely intriguing and in some ways satisfying as well. The reason is that I love to distort the figures I paint in the quest for discovering something more in the human form that appears to the eye.
In a way, I am just following my ancient ancestors and this is a mind-blowing feeling. Not that I have any pretensions of artistry (I am not even trained) but the experience in recent months has been far too profound and perhaps it is in some odd, quirky way related to genetic impulses that I have only recently allowed to overwhelm me!
Image on top left: The Willendorf Goddess, (approximately 30,000 years old) perhaps the oldest sculpture of a human form. The figure is said to represent the various facets of Mother Earth.
July 16th, 2007 at 3:45 am
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