Rock Paintings

African Rock Paintings

African rock art, unlike the rock paintings of Spain and Bhimbetaka, uses subtle polychrome shading that gives their subjects a hint of three-dimensional presence. These paintings are supposed to signify religious beliefs. Some of the best specimens of African Rock paintings can be found at Ukhahlamba-Drakensberg, South Africa . The San people who settled in this area about 8000 years ago, gave meanings to the walls of their caves through these very paintings.

Bhimabetaka Rock Paintings

Surrounded by emerald green forests, the caves near Bhopal, India, prove to be the ideal settings for an art form as striking as the Rock Paintings of Bhimbetaka. The pitch dark and sometimes perilous caves that house these marvelous paintings, have braved the elements for more than twenty thousand years to protect these art treasures.

These paintings tell us that the native man was an expert in simplifying life; he has drawn animals and birds with just two or three strokes. Red, green, and white colors in all hues and varieties were used to paint these images.

The paintings were done primarily with a finger, but historians suggest that these native artists might have also used feathers, wooden sticks, and needles of porcupines for different styles and textures.

Animal life is the most dominant subject of these paintings. Triangles, rectangles, circles, and hexagons seem to be the units of these paintings. The imagination of the native man was obviously unbridled. Sometimes he has shown the internals of animals as if they were transparent.

Though some of these paintings have been ruined beyond repair because of weathering, they still speak volumes about the life and social practices of the native man.

Rock Paintings suggest that like the modern artists, it must have been the feeling to be conveyed was the most important for the prehistoric man. These paintings depict specific scenes and yet speak the universal language of art that transcends everything, even time.