DEGREE SHOW: Cave Paintings Research

Cave Paintings Around The World:

My basic plan for IPS is making a book because I’m always interested in storytelling, narrative, especially the old tales like mythologies, etc.
I looked through all the stories, tales all over the world, in China, Egypt, Greece, etc.
Of course, I have the deepest feeling of Chinese tales.
There're lots of animations I saw on TV when I was a child. One of the most impressive animations is 'The deer of nine colours'. It's adapted from the Chinese ancient stories. Th original story was recorded in the cave painting in Dunhuang.


So, first, I started to do the research about cave paintings all around the world. In my dissertation, I mainly discussed 3 cases of ancient cave paintings from France, America and China.












































Dunhuang Cave Paintings:


The paintings portrayed social life scenes and appearances of various people of different dynasties before the Tang Dynasty among the murals of Dunhuang are the precious materials for researching on the clothes and customs of the people of all the ethics in different dynasties. The murals can be divided into Buddha statue paintings, Buddhist sutra paintings, narrative paintings, alimentation paintings, animal paintings, landscape paintings, decoration paintings and so on.

The Buddha statue paintings include the portraits of various Buddha statues and Bodhisattvas while Buddhist sutra paintings, which are also called "sutra converted painting", uses the means of painting to express the contents of Buddhist sutras. The narrative paintings, however, are characterised by rich contents, vivid plots and strong traces of life, so, they are embedded with great attractiveness. Alimentation paintings are the portraits of the people who believed in Buddhism and donated funds to build grottoes, together with their relatives and servants.


Dunhuang murals have abundant contents, various forms and bright time characteristics. They reflect that the craftsmen at that time had advanced painting skills and abundant imagination power. They provide plenty of objective materials for researching on the Chinese art history. These paintings were not the only narrative, also meant to be decorative, but they served another function: they were a major means for humans to document important figures and illustrate important stories. Especially in religious uses.
























Then,  I tried to capture the feature of the cave painting in my sketchs.
Its style, colours, themes, stories, characters, figures, props, decorations, patterns, so on. 





















The Original Story:

There is an enchanted deer, with nine colours on this furs, always helps those people in need. Once it rescued a merchant who was drowned in the river, in return, the man promises he will never reveal the deer’s whereabout. The man continues his journey, he reaches an imperial palace. The emperor of that kingdom insists on hunting down the spiritual deer down to make clothes out of the deerskin. The man gives in to his greed and betrayed the deer, leads an army of warriors to the spot. To capture the deer, he falls into the river, wants the deer show up to rescue him again. This time, he doesn’t succeed, the deer turns up and see through the man’s trick. All the warriors' arrows turn into dust and the man is finally drowned. 


I've done some fast drawings of a part of the original story, quite specific to every scene, I wanted to see if there're any positions could be useful for my final illustrations.




































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