My friend Margaret remembers an art history professor who lectured the class that "....these were a primitive people who held the naive belief that in a hunt they could capture that which they had first drawn on the cave walls."

Margaret is an artist, gifted in architectural drafting and teaching. "How else does anything we conceive of come into being, without first having been drawn?" she asked. "Everything you can see – your clothing, this desk, the chairs, the building itself – all began as drawings. You drive a car on a street over a bridge, past landscaping – all of which began as drawings. Why does one call that notion primitive, and what is so naive about it?"

To draw is to make real. It is the first step toward knowing, being conscious of, the thing drawn. When I draw an animal I learn how it moves, I feel its anatomy, its range of motion, its behavior.

In the Nave of Lascaux, five stags appear to be struggling against a strong current with their heads just above water. The artist painted the first stag's head above a slight bulge in the rock and that suggests a shoulder. You feel that this stag is emerging from the water, touching on higher ground. The scene is plausible because the simple line drawing is perfectly placed above a jagged ridge in the rock wall that now magically becomes moving water. The illusion is brilliant – the means absolutely minimalist.

Lascaux