So, that makes it more remarkable that what you almost never ever find in this kind of painting are human faces. Possibly there will be human forms... humans hunting and running and swimming, having sex and giving birth... but the humans are like abstracted shadows. Sometimes with pinheads, hardly ever with eyes. And practically NEVER a face.
It's very tempting to make up a taboo about drawing faces. A cultural rule, but I think it has to go deeper than that.
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Very intriguing idea!
As an artist I like to add: it is so very much easier to depict any movement of the body than any expression on a face, let alone individality. The first […]
@futurebird I always joke that I wonder why experts never consider that the Southwestern rock art was done by kids whose mother just told them to go play and stay out of trouble while she […]
@futurebird I think one thing to bear in mind about taboos is they can influence not only art from your own time, but older art as well, so a finely painted face could have been washed away by […]
@futurebird I’ve thought about this a lot in my art practice especially as I’ve turned more and more to petroglyphs from the Americas as a source of inspiration. I agree it’s easy to turn to […]
@futurebird There fantastic figurines, check this one out 25000 years old en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_…
@futurebird Perhaps, like Odo in DS9, they found faces “difficult?”
I'm speaking very broadly, about tens of thousands of years of human history across multiple continents and contexts. And where you find the fine careful paintings of wildlife you DO NOT find […]
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