Joe Bennett: Does painting define us and have we come as far as we think?

A wall painting in the Lascaux Cave a Palaeolithic cave in southwestern France, near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

I've just painted a wall. The roller that I used is a modern invention, a derivative of the wheel. It halves the painting time and doubles the quality of the finish. But it doesn't do the finer work, the fiddly corners, the junction with the skirting board.

For this I reached for a brush. It was made of hog bristle clamped to a wooden handle. And if prehistoric man had stepped into my study as I was working he would have recognised it.

The first painting that we know of is 62,000 years old. It's on the wall of a cave in Spain and it was made by a Neanderthal and its creator has used his or her left hand as a stencil and simply painted round it.

I can remember doing exactly the same thing as a kid and being pleased by the result.

What pleased me is hard to define. Perhaps it was simply that I had stamped my own identity on something. And no doubt it struck ancient man in much the same way.

A cave with a hand painted on the wall has stopped being just a cave and has started to become a home. Property rights begin with the aesthetic urge.

And it remains so today. Move into a new home and one of the first things we all do is to paint the walls. Until then you're merely a squatter, living with someone else's aesthetic choices

I'm pleased by the painting I've just done. I keep going back to admire it, to run my hand over its smoothness, feeling for blemishes. I feel that I've done something worth doing, have improved my world. At the same time I am aware that what I've done is the very lowest form of painting.

Property rights begin with the aesthetic urge, writes Joe Bennett. Move into a new home and one of the first things we do is to paint the walls. Photo / Getty Images

When I was at school I admired several kids in my year group. I admired the curly haired boy who sang like a seven-stone Pavarotti and who duly went on to become an opera singer.

And I admired the fat boy who made me ache with laughter with his imitation of Oliver Hardy, and who duly went on to become a comic actor. And I admired the lad who threw a javelin from here to eternity and who had the body of a Greek statue, and who duly went on to sell real estate.

But the boy I most admired, the boy whose talent I envied more than any other - and I have no idea what has happened to him since - was the boy who could draw. His name was Paul.

If I tried to draw a bird, say, I started with an outline. But there are no outlines in nature and my drawn bird never flew. It stayed on the paper flat and dead.

But when Paul drew a bird there was no outline. There was just a flutter of line and shading, a suggestion of wing and beak and movement and somehow a three-dimensional bird came to life in two dimensions. To me it was a form of conjuring.

Some years after leaving school, on a hot hot afternoon, I paid money to tour a cave in Southern France. The cave was 20 degrees cooler than outside and dimly lit. As my skin cooled and my eyes attuned to the dimness, images rose from the walls, images 20,000 years old, paintings of animals, paintings as alive as Paul's picture of a bird.

Anthropologists will have conjectured on the meaning of these paintings, their purpose. They will have spoken of ritual significance, of invoking the spirits, of animistic fetishes and the dim origins of religion. And perhaps there's some truth in their conjecture.

But there's no need to complicate these things. The paintings were both true to life and beautiful and that's enough. The ancients, just like us, were pleased by having pictures on the wall.

Every teenage bedroom is plastered with images. Every nicely nicely living room has paintings on the wall. Painting is our oldest art form and our most durable and valuable. We are a visual species and it pleases us to decorate our world.

As I've said, I am no painter. But when, in Lyttelton in 2021, I dip my hog-bristle brush into a can of Resene semi-gloss double-black white and lay it out along the line of the skirting board, I am just doing what people have done since they first took shelter in caves. We've come far less far than we think.