the painter

 

“Painting is silent poetry.”

 

~ Plutarch ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of street art by Gregos taken in Paris in September 2017.

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dix mots

 

“Lying is the most fun a woman can have

without taking her clothes off.”

 

~ Natalie Portman ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of a painting by an unknown artist taken in Paris in June 2018.

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dreamcanvas

 

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die,

life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”

 

~ Langston Hughes ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in France in June 2006.

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girl with a rose

 

“Love is like a rose. When pressed between

two lifetimes, it will last forever.”

 

~ Anonymous ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in May 2015.

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le peintre

 

“I do not seek. I find.”

 

~ Pablo Picasso ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in June 2020.

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ladder to the moon

 

“That I could clamber to the frozen moon.

And draw the ladder after me.”

 

~ Arthur Schopenhauer ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in February 2020.

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a study of hands

 

“My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

Like a feather on the back of my hand.”

 

~ T. S. Eliot ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of Picasso’s Étude des Mains (Study Of Hands) painted in Paris in the spring of 1921 taken in le Musée national Picasso–Paris in May 2015.

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gertrudian

 

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistence.”

 

~ Gertrude Stein ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of the garden outside of Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 29 Rue de Fleurus taken in Paris in July 2013.

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make art not war

 

“Art holds fast when all else is lost.”

 

~ German Proverb ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of street art taken in Paris in September 2017.

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embonpoint

 

“I know my breasts, small as plums, would win no blue ribbons.

But in your hands they tremble and fill with song like plump, white birds.”

 

~ Cecilia Llompart ~

 

Digitally enhanced and colourised image created from an analog black and white photo taken in November 1981.

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LA COULEUR DE LA VIE

 

“Life is about using the whole box of crayons.”

 

~ RuPaul ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of street art taken in Paris in May 2018.

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IN THE FLICKERING LIGHT

 

“If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how

people were depicted inside nature, not outside it.

It was a kind of dream time…”

 

~ Gregory Colbert ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in March 2018.

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THE PAINTER

 

“Painting is silent poetry.”

 

~ Plutarch ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of street art by Gregos taken in Paris in September 2017.

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SOFT LIES

 

“It is hot, the light is strong and I have an extraordinary sense of clarity,

although quite what is clear I cannot express.”

 

~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created in May 2012 from a painting by G. Barth.

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GROTTE DE LASCAUX

 

THE LASCAUX CAVE LEGACY AND HOW IT CHANGED A LIFE

 

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Those of you who follow this blog know that I rarely re-blog or re-post things, the Down On Yasgur’s Farm blogs about my experiences at Woodstock being one of the few exceptions. I thought though that it would be worthwhile to revisit this particular post in order to correct and update some of the information and add two new photos of a postcard that I recently rediscovered in my archives. I suppose that I see this sort of like an audio engineer remixing an album, improving its quality and adding a few bonus tracks…(be sure to scroll all the way down to see the photos)…

“We have invented nothing new.”

~ quote attributed to Pablo Picasso upon exiting Lascaux.~

 

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I have written previously about the 50th Anniversary of the Beatles debut in the United States and mentioned that how seeing them in concert in 1966 and later working at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 were, as one would imagine, pivotal moments in my life. Which got me to thinking about another incredible moment in a life that has had more than its share of interesting events, when as a wide-eyed eleven year old I descended the stone steps, went through the two airlock chamber doors and found myself standing in the Hall Of The Bulls in the original Lascaux cave.

The cave was discovered on September 12^th 1940 by Marcel Ravidat and his little dog Robot, out for a day of real or imagined adventure. He was looking for the entrance to a legendary tunnel that supposedly ran under the Vezere River and linked the old Castle of Montignac to the Manor of Lascaux. It was believed that this tunnel would eventually lead to a treasure buried in another tunnel beneath the woods of Montignac. It was actually the little dog that discovered the opening, disappearing down a crack in a jumble of undergrowth and rocks. Marcel enlisted the help of his friends Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, Simon Coencas and the boys eventually cleared the area, exposing a narrow opening into the ground. Thinking that they might have found the legendary tunnel, they squeezed fifteen meters down the narrow shaft. “The descent was terrifying,” Jacques Marsal recalled, who was just fourteen years old at the time. They found themselves standing in a dark underground chamber. Lighting a lantern they had brought with them they now shined its flickering light around the chamber on the walls. Marsal remembers what they saw as a “cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving.” The ceiling, covered with calcite, was pure white. The paintings were brilliantly multicolored in reds, yellows, blacks, browns and ochers. They were standing in the same Hall Of The Bulls I would find myself in some twenty-one years later. And I would look with the same sense of amazement and wonder at the animals on the walls.

My father was in the Army and in October of 1960 he received orders that he was being transferred to France. That December we traveled across a very stormy North Atlantic on a troop transport ship, spending Christmas on the boat. After arriving in Bremerhaven, Germany, we spent New Year’s with relatives in Nürnberg, and then in the second week of January we traveled by train to the base in Rochefort, France where his unit was stationed. We ended up living in a small village called Fouras, located on the coast of the Bay of Biscay between La Rochelle and Rochefort. I attended school at the American Elementary School on the base in Rochefort. And it was this school that, in the fall of 1961, organized a field trip to the Lascaux cave, located above the Vézère River valley near the village of Montignac, for our class. We made the trip in an old brown army bus, one of those ones with the uncomfortable wide vinyl covered metal framed seats. The trip in that slow rattily old bus took about four and a half hours. We had left early in the morning and arrived around lunchtime. We were fortunate in that Jacques Marsal conducted us through the cave and related both his personal impressions and the scientific information available at the time. And although the incredible images of the bulls, the deer and the horses forever etched themselves in my memory, it was when he led us from the Hall Of The Bulls to the right, down the Passageway to the Apse to what is known as the Shaft, that my life changed forever. For there in the Shaft was the depiction of a bird-headed man lying prone or falling down in front of a disemboweled bison. It is the only human figure depicted in the cave. Beneath the man there is a bird upon a stick. To the left of the scene stands a woolly rhinoceros with its tail raised above three pairs of dots. I was spellbound. Here I was gazing upon not just depictions of animals as in the other areas of the cave, but upon a moment caught in time, a story preserved by an unknown prehistoric artist that now, some 17,300 years later, spoke to me with all the feeling and emotion that had inspired its creator. And though I was just a child, I left Lascaux that day with a new sense, a deeply embedded feeling of what it really means to be human. The past had reached out and touched me and I had embraced it. On the long ride back home I sat looking out the window as evening fell wondering, trying to imagine the world in which those first painters had lived. That experience of communication with the past has lived within me all these many years, and although it took me a while to turn that moment of inspiration into a way of life, I ended up spending 29 years working as an archaeologist communicating with and touching the past every day, working at sites that were a few hundred to one hundred thousand years old. The seed planted in an eleven-year-old mind grew and bloomed and became a profession.

In the years after their discovery the caves were visited by thousands of people and that eventually had serious repercussions on the environment in the cave. Carbon dioxide levels rose, condensation formed on the walls and ceilings of the cave causing moisture to run down the paintings. The Green Sickness, a green growth on the walls and paintings, was one of the first signs of how human presence was adversely affecting the cave’s health. High temperatures and humidity, together with the high levels of carbon dioxide, brought on a second plague, The White Sickness, with a layer of calcite forming over many of the paintings. Fungus, bacteria, moisture and carbon dioxide all had a detrimental effect on the delicate balance of the cave’s environmental system, threatening to, and in some cases actually causing serious damage to the paintings. The French Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux, closed the original caves to the public in 1963, not too long after my visit, so I was very lucky. Today the caves are even closed to all scientists and researchers. Due to a series of incredibly stupid blunders and mismanagement over the last 40 years, the great heritage of the Lascaux paintings is in dire danger of being destroyed forever. In typical French bureaucratic tradition, no fewer than four individual agencies have been responsible for its care and management, and there has been no central co-ordination. Thus through the years misguided attempts to deal with the painting’s deterioration have only led to even more serious problems. Today the paintings are truly threatened with destruction due to bacterial infestation and mold. Up to now no good solution has been found and some permanent damage has occurred. And damage has not just been restricted to within the cave. The idiots managing the site managed to build a parking lot directly over parts of the original cave and concerns have been raised about the impact of the weight of the parking area and the cars on the cave below. A replica has been built in an abandoned quarry adjacent to the site, called Lascaux II (see update below), and although it is very good, it is not a replica of the entire cave and of course, nothing can compare to the original. Since my first visit in 1961 I have been back to Lascaux area two times and gone through the replica, on both occasions once in 1985 and most recently in 2006. There are a number of other caves in the area though that are still open to the public and, although they are not as magnificent as Lascaux, I highly recommend visiting them. That whole area of France is a prehistoric paradise. A number of years ago I tried through contacts from my work to apply to revisit the original cave, when they were still allowing researchers in for short periods of time, but I was too far down the scientific food chain to merit such permission and for the time being no one is being allowed in but its caretakers. Jacques Marsal devoted his life to Lascaux and remained as the chief guide of the cave until his death in 1989. I wonder how he would feel about the fact that if nothing sensible is done soon we will lose the treasure of Lascaux forever.

An update:

Muriel Mauriac, who has been the cave’s conservation manager for the past 11 years, recently told the local newspaper France Bleu Périgord that the caves are currently in a more “balanced” state of repair. She explained that the black marks that had started to develop despite the closure of the cave had faded in many places, and that in some areas had almost disappeared completely. Left unchecked, these black marks and stains caused by microorganisms on the walls of the caves can cause serious damage to the cave paintings and the overall condition of the site.

She went on to say, “This is such an iconic cave, so exceptional, that it has been a victim of its own success. After the different microbiological crises that it has been through, we can see that it is doing better. It is still fragile, vulnerable, and a very complex ecosystem. But the period that we saw at the beginning of the 2000s with major development of microorganisms has now stabilised, and is even in regression in certain areas of the caves. Things are stable, which is reassuring. But we still have to be alert, and keep daily watch, to avoid microorganisms from developing.”

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Since I first wrote the original blog in 2014 a new replica of the Lascaux caves, Lascaux IV, has been open since 2016. The web site for Lascaux IV describes it as follows:

“The new International Centre for Cave Art (Centre International d’Art Parietal) in Montignac, France welcomes visitors to an immersive educational experience of the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings. Inside the cave facsimile, the atmosphere is damp and dark, re-creating the humidity within the caves. Sounds are muffled; the temperature drops to about 16 degrees Celsius.  This sequence is dedicated to contemplation, allowing people an experience of the sanctuary that once was. Lights flicker just as the animal fat lamps of Paleolithic times did, revealing the layers of paintings and engravings on the surface of the walls.  

The cave replica was developed through the most advanced 3D laser scanning and casting technologies to replicate the original cave form to a 1 millimeter tolerance.  Following the construction, the caves underwent a careful analog process: 25 artists spent 2 years hand-painting 900 meters of resin rock reproductions. To ensure the highest level of accuracy, artists used the same pigments that the prehistoric painters used 20,000 years ago to recreate the 1900 paintings and engravings that adorn the walls of Lascaux IV.”

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The entrance to the original Lascaux cave photographed on my visit in 1985.

The entrance to the Lascaux cave, then almost not visible, photographed on my visit in 2006.

At the entrance to the cave of Lascaux in 1940, the teacher Léon Laval, the discoverers Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal and the prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil.

Jacques Marsal conducting a tour before the cave was permanently closed to the public in 1963.

The back of a postcard I purchased during my first visit to Lascaux in 1961, signed by Jacques Marsal, one of the original discoverers of the cave who conducted our tour.

The front of the postcard, a black and white photo of The Scene In The Shaft.

A colour photo of The Scene In The Shaft, depicting a bird-headed man lying prone or falling down in front of a disemboweled bison. Seeing this image in the cave in 1961 changed my life.

The Hall Of The Bulls, where one first enters the cave after going through the two air lock doors.

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© 2021 nightpoet all rights reserved

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PORTRAIT

 

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling

is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

 

~ Oscar Wilde ~

 

Digital painting created in November 2020.

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JUPITER

 

“…within the clouds appear numerous illusions,

a woman’s face with flowing hair and a windblown robe,

a bird’s head, fantastic creatures and so much mystery…”

 

~ nightpoet ~

 

This photo of clouds within a mysterious jet stream region on Jupiter was taken in February 2019 by NASA’s Juno Space Probe. Photo courtesy and © of NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS and Kevin M. Gill. (I seldom use other people’s photos, but I couldn’t resist ‘borrowing’ this one.)

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SOLO OUT UPON THE STAGE

 

“It is little men know of women;

their smiles and their tears alike

are seldom what they seem.”

 

~ Amelia Barr ~

 

Digitally enhanced image rendered as a painting created in March 2001.

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SONG FOR MY LADY

 

“Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.”

 

~ Anonymous ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a July 2020 scan of a painting done circa 1969 by a lady friend known only as my “Spirit.”

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LE PEINTRE

 

“I do not seek. I find.”

 

~ Pablo Picasso ~

 

Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in June 2020.

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