Principles of Northwest Coast Art
Subject matter: primarily animals (rather than plants, or the environment) and masks of human faces
Purpose of Representation: interior (X-ray view) rather than exterior views
Gender of artists: traditional times, usually paid professional and traveling male artists except with respect to the Chilkat blankets and household ceremonial objects..
-Anyone could make a ceremonial object.
-Men created the designs for the chilkat blankets, and women wove them.
Design types:
1. configurative (unilateral): object is depicted as a single unit in its biological entirety
2. bilateral (expansive): object is depicted as two profiles attached in the center
3. distributive: parts of the object(s) are scattered in a prescribed manner throughout the surface of the design, and arranged to fit and fill the space.
Colors:
PRIMARY COLOR, used to define outer planes, such as ears, claws, feet, fins and beaks of primary crest animal (daadleeyi--flesh around the person) and inner ovoid, eyebrow shapes of primary crest animal
black (charcoal, octopus ink, vegetable dyes)
SECONDARY COLOR, used on the defining shapes
red (red ochre, vegetable dyes)
(eyebrows of secondary crest animal, identifying details, such as beaks, claws, tails, flues, and teeth)
TERTIARY COLORS, used for fine details, extra information about story illustrated
yellow (vegetable dyes, minerals)
green or blue green (abalone shell, vegetable dyes, minerals)
Customary shapes (at least 4,500 years old)
1. ovoid--every opening in the body: eyes, ears, mouths, spinal vertebrae, joints (especially the 8 sacred points of spiritual entry to the body, the saagi), the head, fins, hand/paw shapes.
2. Cup or U shapes: defining shapes, such as eyebrows, beaks, claws, tails, flukes, tongues
3. S shapes (twisted elaborations of the U shapes)
4. Split U shapes (bilateral view of U shapes as conceived of as the three-dimensional shape of a canoe)
Saagi:
1. sacred areas of the body which are viewed as containing essential elements of the person/creature (soul, mind, inner being). They are viewed in a clockwise pattern, from the right forearm, to the right upper arm, to the left upper arm to the left forearm to the left thigh, to the left lower leg to the right lower leg, to the right thigh.
Tlingit mysticism also includes depiction of the yahaayi: facial aura, sometimes depicted in white.