I never expected this story to generate such incendiary mail, e- or otherwise. It was as if I had trampled something sacred. In my defense, it was an innocent observation, as in “Look, the emperor is buck nekkid!”

CAVE PAINTING

So there I was, taking a snapshot of my brother-in-law. He was standing in front of drawings on a cave wall. The cave was isolated, well hidden, inaccessible, and not known to many twenty-first-century travelers.

We had been told the paintings were thought to be centuries old. It was easy in this lonesome place for me to imagine a band of nomadic Native Americans living or at least summering in this high mountain condo.

The wall motif showed humans hunting a variety of hooved, ring-tailed, and horned beasts across the rocky face. I appreciated the sanctity of what I was witnessing, but a question kept burbling up in my mind like indigestion. Why were early painters of western art such bad artists?

The warriors’ hands looked like branches on a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Their feet resembled those on a camera tripod. The elk, deer, or moose looked like sawhorses with mangled TV antennae for antlers. What I assumed to be bears could easily have been armadillos, abandoned tires, old disk blades, a carpet remnant, or elephant spoor on a Tanganyika airstrip.

It was puzzling to me. I have a second-grader. He draws people with hands. Granted, they look like potholder gloves, but they resemble hands much more than the ones in the cave painting do.

I have observed that in every group of thirty or forty people (however many a clan is), there are a few who have a natural ability to carry a tune, some who can shoot straight, some who are good with dogs, and some who can draw.

Were there no cave painters who knew which way legs bent, who could depict the shape of a buffalo, a foot, or an antler? Was it because they were forced to use the tar-and-broken-limb medium? Were they limited by the size of the canvas? Was the lighting always bad?

It has been pointed out that drawing is an art that must be refined. Realistic depiction must be learned. I guess that must be true, though it still seems to me you could raise Frederic Remington or Norman Rockwell in the wilderness, give them a piece of charcoal, stand ’em in front of a cave wall, and get a more accurate representation. Shouldn’t there be some inherent ability?

The real truth is probably more shabby. The chief’s daughter always fancied herself an artist, but all she could draw were stick figures. The chief decreed that no one should draw better than she, and it stuck. So the real native artists turned to turquoise, silver, and beadwork, and waited for Charlie Russell to come along and paint them realistically.

Or is this something an art history major would know?