WHO MADE IT – ROCK ART BY BEGINNERS:

Westwater Creek, Grand County, Utah.

Photograph Peter Faris, October 8, 2001.

In considering who made the rock art we tend to avoid one inconvenient truth. No matter how beautiful some of our favorite panels are the artist who created them had to start somewhere. Nobody can accomplish a high quality work of art without considerable practice and experience. Back in my early days of art teaching we used to say that a student must make a requisite number of mistakes before they can count on getting it right. As students of rock art I think we all too often ascribe poorly done images to someone rushing, not taking the required time to get it right, instead of admitting that many images were done very poorly because of inexperience, and perhaps youth.

On  February 15, 2015 , I addressed one aspect of this question in a posting entitled A Beginner's Mistake which discussed a petroglyph on McConkie Ranch near Vernal, Utah, which showed drastic changes in scale from top to bottom based on an inexperienced artist's overlooking of the problem of fitting the scale of his image to the size of the available surface (originally posted on June 30, 2013). 

Westwater Creek, Grand County, Utah.

Photograph Peter Faris, October 8, 2001.

The illustrations above, from upper Westwater Creek, in eastern Utah, show some examples of imagery that may have been produced by inexperienced artists. The white equestrian figures in the illustration at top were created by a Ute artist that I assume was quite young, or inexperienced, or both. Equally, the horsemen in the grouping in the second illustration are so crudely done that we may be justified in assuming that their creator was just learning the trade.

Guthrie, in The Nature of Paleolithic Art (2005), presented many examples of Paleolithic art from the caves of Europe that he identified as beginner’s mistakes, and while he may be right or wrong on specific examples he certainly had a great point. Nobody gets to start at the top; you start at the bottom, make your mistakes, and work your way up.

Paleolithic art, perhaps drawn by inexperienced

artists. Guthrie, R. Dale Guthrie, 2005,
The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 8.

“Paleolithic art contains the work of many inexperienced artists. Throughout this book I’ll show you quite a few works by artists who are developing their drawing facility. Such works are usually bypassed in popular books on this subject. And they are not easily integrated into most theories explaining Paleolithic art.” (Guthrie 2005:8) This is self-selection bias, they are overlooked and so our whole picture of ancient art is skewed toward what we see as a high level of quality and professionalism.

Paleolithic art, perhaps drawn by inexperienced

artists. Guthrie, R. Dale Guthrie, 2005,
The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 12.

“Rather scribbly works by inexperienced Paleolithic drawers who did a lot of redrawing. A, Ibex, Espelugues, Fr. B-C, Horses, Lascaux, Fr. D, Wild cattle or aurochs, Limeuil, Fr. E, A mix of images from Les Combarelles, Fr. Horses in B and C are speared; the one in C is penetrated by a spear in the gut and bleeding profusely (this portrays a botched killing job, as a spear-hunter must hit the thorax for a clean kill).” (Guthrie 2005:12)

As I said above, while Guthrie may be right or wrong on any specific example I believe that he has put his finger on a serious oversight that still affects rock art studies. Instead of looking at what we can learn from all images (including the crudest or least aesthetic), we ignore some to focus on the best and most beautiful. This adds a measure of self-selection bias to our supposedly objective investigations. In the end we may have a one-sided or biased viewpoint on all rock art because of this.

REFERENCE: 

Guthrie, R. Dale

2005    The Nature of Paleolithic Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.