African Art Primary Class Clips

I'm in Africa.

Africa is huge - 5,000 miles long

and over 4,000 miles from east to west.

That's three times bigger than the USA.

In fact, there are 53 countries in the continent,

with many different landscapes, from desert...

to tropical forest...

to savannah grassland.

But it's not just the wildlife that's diverse.

The 800 million people who live here come from 3,000 unique cultures.

In Islamic countries like Sudan, the written word is of great importance

and it's incorporated into drawings and paintings.

And Ethiopia has some beautiful illuminated Christian manuscripts.

But art isn't just drawing and painting.

It can be pottery, sculpture, decorative leatherwork.

The San Bushmen of Namibia even decorate ostrich eggs.

And the Wudabi of Niger adorn their own bodies.

One particular art form that many people associate with Africa is wood carving,

and you can find all forms of that right throughout Africa,

from the fine wooden scultures made by the Makonde people of Tanzania

to the marvellously carved wooden headdresses

made by the Dogon of Mali.

Many of the pieces have a cultural meaning,

so I've come to Ahwiaa... I hope I've pronounced that right!

It's a village that is famous for its wood carving

and I've come to find out a little bit about the significance of many of the carved pieces.

One popular carving is the akuaba,

or fertility doll.

And another amazing sculpture is an interlocking chain of figures

carved from a single piece of wood.

It represents strength from unity.

But not all carvers in Africa make traditional pieces,

many contemporary artists produce work in their own individualistic style.

This carving follows the natural shape of the wood,

resulting in beautifully organic sculptures.

Wooden carvings from Africa completely shook the Western art world

in the early part of the 20th century.

Artists like Picasso and Matisse,

they saw carved wooden masks from Africa,

wonderful statues, and it changed the way they looked at things.

And, as a result, they completely altered their way of working.

The striking shapes of art from Africa

gave European artists inspiration to rebel

against the conventions of Naturalism.

Picasso loved the geometry of African sculpture,

with its highly stylised representations

of the body and the face.

His painting Woman's Head is inspired by a Fang mask.

Sculptors like Epstein, Henry Moore, Giacometti

were also very influenced by African carvings.

The white South African artist, Walter Battiss,

borrowed extensively from rock art.

He believed that European art languished in the doldrums

until the West rediscovered so-called "Primitivism".

But there's always been an interchange of ideas

between Africa and the rest of the world.

Camel trains took Western ideas across the Sahara and vice versa.

By the 20th century, artists in Africa were experimenting

with all sorts of different techniques -

sculpture, sketching, through to print-making,

photography and painting.

'They're big...

'..they're bold...

'..and sometimes...

'terrifying.'

But there's more to these African masks

than the stereotypical image we get from movies.

They have a spiritual tradition that dates back thousands of years,

so today, I've come to take a look at the meaning behind the mask.

The Dogons are one tribe from Mali

who still use these masks in their rituals to this day.

At the heart of their society are the masquerade dancers.

These masked dancers convey messages and lessons about birth and death.

The patterns on them have different meanings.

For instance, the zig-zags on them show the path of the ancestors,

cos masks in Africa are mainly linked to the worship,

or to the sacredness of the ancestors.

And masks again, because they are linked to these ancestors,

are elements of African knowledge.

They come from the Bush, which is where the ancestors live,

and they bring this knowledge to you, the living community.

These are masks linked to the initiation of boys

and, in Africa, as you say in the property world,

it's "location, location, location".

In Africa, it is "initiation, initiation, initiation".

It is at the centre of the whole understanding of African masks

and masking tradition.

And the Chikunza mask here from Zambia, for instance,

is the mask that comes to the village, steals the boys, they say,

takes them to the forest, where they're initiated.

So, the Chikunza will "swallow", in quotes, these children,

these boys, and bring them out...

-Swallows the boy and regurgitates as a man.

-As a man.

This is a mask from Nigeria, amongst the Ebu of Nigeria.

These are very heavy masks, they weigh up to 200kgs.

You couldn't really get that on your head, so how would you actually...

-wear it?

-It's actually danced by one person.

-No!

Yes, he goes in and dances the mask.

When the mask is performing, it's not the dancer performing,

it's the spirit performing.

So, it forms a focal point of the communal performance

and you can't play around with that,

because these are sacred issues.

There are sacred symbolisms,

there are sacred histories, stories behind these masks.

I'm gonna try my hand at some of the oldest art in recorded history.

Rock art.

Engravings and paintings on rock surfaces

are probably the earliest kinds of art that humans have ever made,

and there are many beautiful examples all across Africa,

from the Sahara to South Africa.

And I feel very honoured to have been brought here

to see the extent of this artwork, all this wonderful painting

right the way along this huge rock face.

This site in South Africa was painted by the San Bushmen.

I'm going to create my own piece of rock art,

using the same things that they might have had to hand.

And to give me some help, is artist and rock art conservationist,

Steve Townley Bassett.

-This bit here that looks like...

-Yeah.

..the buttock muscles of some fella. That could be his leg there,

so I'm going to start with that.

-What sort of brush?

-You could take that one, it's a medium thickness.

That'll do. And I'll just put in that... Oh, it's nice.

-And you've mixed up all these colours?

-Yes, I have.

These are materials I've collected in the field over the years.

One of the things that's intrigued me most about rock art

in southern Africa, was the processes that the artists used,

in other words, the paints, the pigments, the implements.

Where were these collected, how did they actually make the paint?

-Yeah.

-So that's really inspired me to make these things.

-What's this one made of?

-You're looking at springbok tail hairs,

bound with beeswax and sinews.

And you bound all these colours with what?

-The binder that we're using is egg.

-Oh.

Yeah, and I believe that they would've used that.

Either ostrich egg or eggs from birds nesting in the area,

and certainly egg is a wonderful binder.

-That would preserve it on the rock?

-Yes, it binds the particles together

and also binds the particles to the rock.

What I'm trying to recreate is one of the images I've seen on the rock

of the shaman.

Meaning "power" and "full of",

that's the shaman.

It was these shamans who created the rock art.

They didn't just paint things they saw in everyday life,

they also painted their religious beliefs and practices.

The shaman believed strongly in the spiritual world

and would dance himself into a trance to enter that world.

And, as he gained power from animal spirits,

the shaman was sometimes transformed into forms

that were half-man, half-beast.

You can see I've put an antelope head on top of this character,

so that it's indicating that he's already turning into the animal

and getting the animal's power.

-In other words, half-animal, half-human.

-That's it, yeah.

-OK.

It's just amazing to feel that I'm using

the same sorts of pigment and the same sorts of brushes

that have been used in these sites for thousands of years.

It's nice to be working on this surface because, at first glance,

you think it's going to be like blotting paper,

soaking up everything and spreading the moisture out,

-but it doesn't. The stuff you put on stays where you put it.

-Mm-hmm.

And a little bit of the liquid leeches out into the dusty surface,

but you can see the way these have stayed exactly where I put them.

The little shapes and everything

has just stayed perfectly... Wonderful.

It's great to think that all these colours are ground up from stuff

-you find on the site.

-Correct.

I'm also painting a large antelope called an eland.

It was one of the most important animals to the San Bushmen

and appears time and time again

at many different sites.

Look at these dots on the rock behind me here.

There are legs coming out of that dot there,

almost looks like a beak or a head on the top,

-and if you follow that along there...

-Oh, there's another one.

And as we get closer to this eland here,

-it looks like they're actually people now.

-Oh, OK.

There's a transformation happening here on the rock face.

You have a lot of speculation

about what dots in a rock art painting mean.

It's thought that it's closely linked with the spirit world

and trance and with imagery that is seen in the early stages of trance.

I think what you've done here

is you've created a wonderful energy between this woman here

-and that shaman on the rock face.

-Lovely.

It looks good and it's powerful.

It's great to be painting in this amazing setting

and just imagining that you're one of the San people, the Bushmen.

Say there's a group of us and we've all come here to this sacred site

and putting down our images on the rock,

working our magic.

-Just wonderful, isn't it?

-Powerful.

Yeah.

Brown.

One of the first European artists to be inspired by African art

was Pablo Picasso. He didn't like to admit it though,

because he preferred people to think he'd thought of the style on his own.

He was very drawn to the simple lines and geometric shapes

that African masks have.

The characters in his paintings soon began to have oddly shaped faces,

just like them.

This is how Picasso's Cubist style was born.

The African influence is clear in this famous example of Cubism,

The Ladies of Avignon.

Picasso was introduced to African art by his friend and fellow artist,

Henri Matisse. There was an exhibition in Paris in 1900,

where African work was first shown.

Visitors were amazed and a bit frightened

by this mysterious new culture,

but Matisse loved it and soon started collecting African pieces.

Matisse was less interested in the geometric shapes that Picasso liked.

He preferred the bold colour and decorative elements,

influences which he combined in this masterpiece - The Green Stripe.

Africa still influences artists today.

British artist Chris Ofili even used lumps of African elephant dung

on his canvasses.

Originally, Chris brought back elephant dung from Africa,

but later on he got it from London Zoo

and dried it in an airing cupboard at home.

As you can see in this piece, the dung is a way of, quite literally,

incorporating Africa into his work.

It must've worked. In 1998, Chris Ofili won the famous Turner Prize.

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