Vase Art Pottery

26 Aug, 2007 in art pottery by admin

Vase Art Pottery

African Tribal Art – a Rich Heritage of Fascinating Diversity

Tribal art has been part of African culture for more than 6,000 year. There are hundreds of tribes in Africa and each one of them has their own unique style of art forms adding wide diversity to African tribal art. The best known of the forms of African tribal art are:

1. Sculpture

Most of the African sculptures are done in wood. Often in these wooden sculptures, artists depict the spirits of deceased people. Features like the symmetric facial expressions, strong, unmoving posture, and portrayal of humans in the prime of life, large heads, and prominent navels can be noticed in the wooden human sculptures.

2. Pottery

The beauty of the African artwork can also be noticed in the traditional utensils and various pottery items. Hand made vases, pots, plates and bowls made of clay were further painted by artists to make each of the items more appealing. Along with wood and clay, some terracotta pieces of genuine antiquity have also been found which tell us about the ingenuity of these ancient people.

3. Jewellery

Items like earrings, neck pieces, bracelets or other jewelry pieces of African tribal society are one of a kind and have a genuine ceremonial or daily usage background. Hand crafted jewelleries, made from elephant hair, giraffe hair, lion claw, ivory, bones of animals, are not only beautiful but also unique in their own way.

4. Masks

Now let's move on to masks. Who does not know about African masks? In most of the traditional dance forms, dancers wear masks. In fact ritual African costumes remain incomplete without masks. Face masks are used during processions, local festivals and other celebrations and even at funerals. There are even tribal masks of African animals such as elephants, zebras and antelopes.

5. Paintings

African painters use highly abstracted and regimented visual canons along with different shades of colors to represent the qualities and characteristics of any subject. Nature is the most common subject in African paintings.

In many of the African tribal art forms, artists try to capture the various forms of animals and plant life. However, the unifying theme is the fascination with the human figure. There are some famous painters of the Western world who were highly influenced by African paintings such as Gauguin, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso.

About the Author

Tony Chalmers is a travel journalist who has written many insightful articles on African tribal art forms which have been published in newspapers, magazines and web mags. He is also a collector and is a proud owner of some beautiful African paintings.

ART question help 10 pts!?

1.The Lion Gate of Mycenae which is in southern Greece, is typical of the megalithic architecture of the same period using mosaic covered wooden beams to relieve some of the weight of the arch.
True
False

2.From pottery to painting to sculpture, Greeks moved toward portraying the human figure and the rest of the world with more true to life realism, as we actually see it.
True
False

3.The practice of cremation where the body of the deceased was burned in a ceremonial fire and the ashes were then deposited into a funerary vase was practiced widely in Greece.
True
False

4.The Peplos Kore sculpture of a woman, found on the Acropolis in Athens, is named "peplos" because it represented the seafaring culture of the Peplos Island.
True
False

5. A unique Greek krater, called the Francois Vase, displays the Geometric Style of registers to tell a story and it is one of the first such vessels to exhibit the name of both the potter and the painter who made it.
True
False

1. true
2. true
3. false
4. true
5. false

part 1, Decorating a clay vase with flowers