Some face art allows the wearer to acquire animal attributes and powers, as in this photograph of a Mayoruna woman wearing markings around her mouth and whiskers signifying a powerful animal like the jaguar, in addition to the red shape across her eyes - a color which also symbolically represents power and vitality. Some face art, for example, is designed to turn the wearer into a mythic character like a god, so the wearer can impersonate them in ritual. Signs, symbols and icons might also be used to expand the human identity to include supernatural or animal elements. In such a case, in conjunction with the “dehumanizing” geometric shapes, symbols or graphic markings might be used that could be read like a written language within the tribe. That identity might be a social one, conveying one’s membership within a specific tribe, as in the face of a Kayapo child of the Amazon, or one’s achievement of a certain step within a social hierarchy. Whereas the first goal of tribal makeup is to disguise the wearer, or more precisely, to remove his individual human identity, the ultimate goal is to create another identity - to turn them into something new. Their eyes turn the design into a living mask.įrom a modern facepainter’s perspective, think of all the different things you can turn designs like these into. By placing patterns to bring attention to their eyes, you give the wearer control over their new identity. Just as in the approach of any modern makeup artist, the designs center around the wearer’s eyes because our eyes control the perception of our identity. Notice how these designs effect the appearance of the eyes, how the model’s identity seems to change from design to design. That is why…it makes play with anti-natural elements such as straight lines, triangles, circles and all rigid geometric figures which stand in conspicuous contrast with the mobility of facial features the organic curves of muscles.”
#Tribal body paint model skin#
In his analysis of the “underlying raison d’être” for all tribal body painting, Michel Thévoz in “The Painted Body” states: “the skin decoration is functionally designed to dehumanize, depersonalize,…to baffle identification. Human faces have no inherent hard lines or edges, so lines or strong geometric shapes immediately make the face “nonhuman” and ready to become “other”. The quickest way to alter a human face is to put a hard line on it. They illustrate what I see as the first step to painting a tribal face: divide the face into areas of color with bars, stripes or strong shapes like triangles. The next eight are basic patterns of the Southeast-Nuba of Sudan, Africa, from a set of analytical sketches in the book N uba Personal Art by James C. The first four are from Amazon examples depicted in the book Body Decoration by Karl Gröning. STEP 1 – Basic Tribal Facepainting TransformationĪbove are re-creations in black and white on one model of patterns you can find in traditional tribal facepainting.
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