Showing posts with label Old Bering Sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Old Bering Sea. Show all posts

Wednesday, 21 October 2015

No Cowboys and Lots of Indians

At Frieze Masters I fell in love with these drawings by American Indians. They were shown by the Donald Ellis gallery, which is based in New York and Vancouver. I think the drawings' appeal for me was partly the fact that I used to spend so many hours trying to get hooves and fetlocks right, and these artists clearly shared the same preoccupation:






















I also loved these masks, which were late 19th or early 20th century, made by Yup'ik Eskimo from Alaska:





and this one, made by the Aleut in the 18th century:

The things I really coveted though were the tiny objects. This button shaped like a seal's face, for example, from the Old Bering Sea, St Lawrence Island, Alaska, dating from around 100-300 AD:


and these expressive little "human head toggles" dating from as long ago as 200 BC, from more or less the same sort of area: