Wildlife
By Robert Humphreys.
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Dawn light spills gentle on the entrance of a cave in Chauvet, France, illuminating a stick figure, painted on the wall. An animal: four legs, head, ears, an eye. Looking at this figure is a man, sitting cross-legged by the ambers of a fire. He appears transfixed by the eye of the animal. The eye grows more clear with the increasing focus of a new day.

Some 34,000 years later, I am sitting by the ambers of my fire, in my home in Malibu, California. Dawn light is spilling through my insulated double-pane windows, gently illuminating two lions at rest in pine needles, hanging there on the wall of my Great Room. The painting is called  INTERLUDE , by Jorge Mayol. I am transfixed by the eye of the animal. The lion is not looking AT me. The big cat is looking THRU me. I look at this painting every day, and each time I see something new. Ditto, with all the other Mayols that own me.

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It would be easier to count the grains of sands on a beach than to explain why man has carried with him, since the beginning of time, a desire to embrace his living space with the image of animals. Do I covet Jorge Mayol s lions on my wall because there I feel I am in control of them? Or do I seek to draw from their spirit to strengthen mine? The fact they are worth a lot of money seems not important, but yet is not irrelevant. Any art this fine SHOULD be worth a lot of money. Art is its own definition of wealth.

In the beginning there were cave paintings, but during tens of thousands of years artists improved their materials. What actually changed was detail, rather than focus, or artistic desire to seduce the eye of the beholder. Contemporary artists like Robert Bateman, Nancy Glazier, Jorge Mayol and Eric Forlee have taken us to a new level, with their exacting detail. I look at  INTERLUDE now and I can FEEL the prick of the pine needles, COUNT the long white whiskers on the cats. With a magnifying glass, I can count the body hair! Sometimes, I think they just might pounce down off the wall and have me for lunch!

While my home is different from caves in Chauvet, or Lascaux, (20,000 years old) or Ardeche (some say 34,000 years old), or Spain s Alatmira (17,000 years old) , the intent is still the same. Look at me. Feel me. Want me.

Figures in caves were born in simplicity, no doubt founded in lack of raw materials. But every thousand years or so, the figures improved, became more detailed. Paintings on tombs in Egypt were extremely detailed.

Still, minimalism sustained through a growth of realism, with artists like Catalan or abstract painter Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Realism is the art of presenting something that the viewer wants to reach out and touch. The fur is soft. The pine needles are sharp. Eyes pierce.

Few artists do it better than Jorge Mayol. Oil or acrylic, his journey into detail is the same. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was raised on a family farm near the rural village of Ayacucho. At his backdoor were cougars, peccary, red deer, jaguars. His father, an inveterate doodler, locked his kids into vigorous drawing lessons. Mayol s first paintings were of the horses he rode.

Mayol was apprenticed to renowned illustrator and anatomist Axel Amuchastegui, who produced volumes of paintings of animals, country by country. Mayol reached deep down and found his own level of brilliance: detail.

The use of light is as much his hallmark as is realism. As he says:  "Light is the way nature paints."
Some 34,000 years ago, a man watching a dawn light gently reveal a painting on his cave wall, would agree.

For more information about paintings by Jorge Mayol, call or write:

Robert Humphreys
Malibu Mountain Gallery
5312 Derry Ave. suite F
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
818.889.5008
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