The Lascaux Cave is a network of caves located in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. Inside its walls lives an illustration of a prehistoric animal dated to over 22,000 years ago. Rendered in thick lines, an animal stands on four legs. A bump rises at its neck and dips into a protruding belly. It is covered in brown, almost burnt red, splotches. But what is most striking about the animal are the two long horns rising from its head. This cave painting is titled “The Unicorn of Lascaux.”
On an entirely different note, a man stands atop rocks before a vast terrain of mountain peaks and rocky precipices blanketed in thick, passing clouds. Ahead of him, there seems to be no end to the landscape he is pensively observing, his back turned toward the viewer. This is German artist Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” completed in 1818. The man in his black coat draws the line of sight toward the center, blurring the surroundings into an immersion that fools you into believing you are seeing through his eyes, breathing the cold atmosphere the painting radiates.
Paintings and illustrations are windows into possibilities entirely removed from your own. In your immersion, observation, and analysis of an image, much like a book, you are vicariously experiencing something vastly different from your everyday life. People are sometimes made aware of the existence of animals, cultures, and societies entirely unknown to them through a single work of art. You look at a painting and recognize the reality of its subject simply because it was created, and there you are, experiencing it and being moved by it.
In The Princess of Himmapan, Queen Khin paints while telling her son Prince Zeya the story of the Himmapan Forest, drawing the elements that make it otherworldly into something he can see and touch.
She grabbed one of the papers she saw on his desk along with the paint that lay next to it. She took the orange pencil and began to draw the range of mountains that cascaded together to hide the forest. The prince stood up to watch her draw as she added yellow right on top of the mountain.
“The Himmapan Forest is a beautiful forest on top of the Himalayan Mountains, but it isn’t like any other forest anyone’s ever seen. Everything in there is more beautiful than any forest here” (3).
Khin draws trees with purple trunks and pink leaves, some mirroring the colors of a dawning sky. She adds the fantastical animals native to Himmapan: ginger cows with butterfly wings, elephants with fish-like scales, albino tigers with lizard tails, all adorned in jewelry made of gold. And most importantly, she draws the Kinaree, the guardians of Himmapan, rendered with pride and care.
Khin drew one Kinaree, green wings growing out from the flank of her golden, feathery, bowl-shaped body. The feathers continued into her legs, completely covering them, to the point that her birdlike legs were hidden, though he could still make out the raptorial golden talons his mother drew her to have (5).
Paintings are not only an aid to storytelling. They are a form of it. They hold lessons, capture the present, and preserve it for future generations to discover. They memorialize what has been, keeping it real and alive long after the moment has passed.
Prince Zeya gains access to the Himmapan Forest through its painted image. The experience is not so different from that of Edmund, Lucy, and their cousin Eustace Scrubb, who are pulled into Narnia through a painting of a ship on a raging ocean in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or siblings Ben and Kim, who find themselves transported to seventeenth-century Europe when lightning strikes the museum they are exploring in Search for the Jewel of Polaris: Mysterious Museum, turning its paintings into doorways.
We tend to confine such adventures to movies or books, but the same journey is available to us if we allow ourselves to be fully immersed in the art, the craft, and the story behind each painting we encounter. Let yourself be taken by possibility, by imagination, and see where it leads.
By Catherine Fangon