Wildlife

Project 30: Wildlife 

Here is a link to Wildlife, an online juried show that I was accepted into in June. The following is a description for the show submission.

The earliest artworks known to us, cave paintings from over 30,000 years ago, prominently feature depictions of animals. It is suggested those subterranean images might have been intended as a form of "hunting magic", an attempt by ancient artists to summon up game and increase the yield of the hunt. Another theory is that prehistoric shamans believed that by retreating into dark, secreted caves and creating images of powerful beasts they could draw power from those images into themselves, perhaps even taking on attributes of the beasts they depicted.
Millennia later in Egyptian reliefs, gods were regularly given the form of half-human half-animal hybrids. Ra the sun god is depicted with the head of a falcon, and sores through the sky on a flaming ship bringing light to the world. Set, originally the patron of Upper Egypt, would eventually be depicted with the head of a jackal, and be associated with all things chaotic and evil. The animal form symbolically conveys to the viewer the god's nature and supernatural abilities.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Native North American peoples held a variety of beliefs centered around sacred spirit animals. In their arts, crafts, and religious monuments its apparent that a reverence for nature and a faith in the power of animals as spiritual guides was an intrinsic part of the belief system.
In modern art and culture, the human/animal divide is still a topic of interest: from the ever growing field of wildlife photography, to the embalmed sculptures of Damien Hirst, to the current cultural obsession with animalistic monsters such as vampires and werewolves.