Cave Art - #1 Standing Bison from Altimira, Spain

Here are some questions to use in leading the discussion about the first painting in the CAVE ART series - Standing Bison from Altimira, Spain.

• What is a bison? Does it look like any animal we have nowadays and in the U.S.?
• These are painted on the ceiling.
  
• Do you remember when we spoke about the difficulty of painting the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo? (I guess he wasn’t the first to suffer for his art.)
• Consider asking the children to stay seated and lean back while reaching up and pretending to paint a ceiling above their heads. For how long can they hold their hand up? Yes, they will get dramatic and moan and groan but they will also get the point that this was difficult and that to continue, it must have been important.
• The artist sometimes used bulges in the natural rock formations to make the drawings seem more life-like.
  
• Where do you think the bulges for this one are?
  
• Why do you think so?
• Have you ever gone looking for rocks that remind you of something and then you add paint to complete the image? That’s fun. If you haven’t tried that, do so sometime.
• What kind of light did the artist use to when making these drawings in the dark caves?
• Did they need a little light or a lot?
• What do you think the drawings looked like by fire and torch?
• I am told that when these beautifully drawn and shaded pictures with these natural bulges in them are seen by candle light, that the flickering light casts shadows and causes the appearance of the animal in motion. Isn’t that something amazing?
• Do you like the soft shading?
• How did the artist achieve that effect?
• Do you think the bison looks real? What makes him look real (or not real)?
• How did the artist get to know the animal?
  
• Could the artist go to the library and take out a book and spend hours studying the picture and tracing it?
  
• What did the artist study?
  
• How?
• Have you ever looked at something so much and for so long that you could draw it without even looking at the object?
  
• Maybe you can do this with your pet.
  
• Or maybe you can do this with something that you love and have practiced drawing over and over.
  
• How did this artist study?
• Was it easy or safe to study the living animal?
• Why was the bison important to the artist?
• How did the artist feel when it was time to kill and eat the bison?
• What did the artist do with those feelings?
• Why did the artist paint the bison?