Patterns
The patterns are one of the most important aspects in their communication through painting. The patterns are usually repeated throughout their design with only a very slight variation and different colour choice. The geometric patterns and shape are first drawn with the black outline and later filled in with colour. The patterns are grouped together throughout the walls in terms of their basic design structure. Creating the right tools to allow accuracy and freedom for the wife becomes a difficult task. The tools can't restrict the female painter from creating her art. They have to have tools for the large geometric shapes of flat colour and small brushes for the very small areas, outlines, and sacks. The advancement of tools has allowed faster and more complex designs throughout the Ndebele's homes.
These very simple looking painted houses are really a complex system of tradition and creation. This painted tradition is still alive and as every generation passes it down little changes begin to exist. This is their way of communication and expression through their home. The women work long and hard to finish these walls and are noticed by the outside community because of her individual talent and expression.
Read more about this topic: Ndebele House Painting
Famous quotes containing the word patterns:
“I’ve begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward even after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children’s and then our grandchildren’s eyes.”
—Anne Cassidy (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)