Cave Man Wall Art

Cave Man Wall Art

This subject brings age into a room, which is something almost nothing else on a wall does. A landscape is a place and a portrait is a person, but ochre handprints and charcoal animals carry the sense of a very long time having passed, and rooms full of new, flat, machine-made surfaces respond well to that. Put one in a white-walled new build and the place stops feeling quite so recently unwrapped.

Palette is part of the reason it works. Earth reds, burnt orange, charcoal, chalk white and the buff of stone — a set of colours that predates every trend cycle and sits happily against concrete, plaster, leather and untreated timber. It will not fight a rug and it will not date, having never joined a decade in the first place.

Texture is where good and weak examples part company. Cave imagery depends on the surface it was made on: the pitting of rock, the bloom of pigment, the way a line follows a bulge in the wall. Images that render the figures as clean vector shapes on a flat tan ground lose all of that and end up looking like clip art. Look for irregularity and grain.

Scale can go large without becoming overbearing, unusually for a bold subject, because the shapes are simple and the contrast is soft rather than harsh. A wide horizontal piece of running animals over a sideboard works at a size that would be oppressive for a high-contrast photograph.

Lighting is the placement tip. Side light flatters this subject enormously — a lamp set low and off to one side rakes across the image and exaggerates the sense of relief, exactly as it does on a real rock face. Overhead downlights flatten it. If the only light in the room is a central fitting, expect the piece to look better in the evening than at noon.