The great majority of the designs below were sourced from traditional craft and art works made by native American tribes of the Pacific North West of the United States and Canada. These include the Tlingit, Kwakiutl [now called: Kwakwaka'wakw] and Haida peoples.
Tlingit - Thunderbird
NW Coast - Hocker design
Haida - Orca
Kwakiutl - Raven
SW America - Swastika
Haida - Mythic Raven
Kwakiutl - Thunderbird
Kwakiutl - Killer Whale
Kwakiutl - Thunderbird
Haida - Thunderbird
Kwakiutl - Thunderbird
Kwakiutl - Raven
Kwakiutl - Beaver
Haida - Bear
Haida - Double Raven
Kwakiutl - Squash Blossom
[Although the designs themselves are traditional and (presumably) in the pubic domain, copyright over the actual images is claimed by the producer of these designs and the publisher: Maarten Hesselt van Dinter and HvD Publishing. The images are available here for so long as there is no objection: no response to emails from either party has been received in relation to obtaining permission to post the images here.]
I came across a couple of HvD books and the (essentially random) selection above constitutes about one tenth of the available designs from the combined dvd and text-less 2006 publication called: 'Native Designs from North America'. More from the other book (South America) in the next week or so.
Previous line drawing design entries: Celtic Designs ---- Indian Designs
4 comments :
These are wonderful. I like how some of them suggest entirely different creatures, and not just by embedding them; Kwakiutl (Thunderbird), for example, reminds me strongly of a crab, while Haida (Double Raven) is like a double toucan. And Kwakiutl (Raven) makes me think of Jim Woodring...
Toucan! Exactly. I nearly put that in as a placeholder image title but then realised that toucans are at least a couple of thousand kilometres away from the tribal area.
The modernity of these is startling, and yet they remain distinctly tribal. Can't wait for the second set.
Very well done, I have colored quite a few mandala's that are very similar to most of these. Being of Native American decent myself, I can say it is very nice to see some of this done on a blog. Thank you, great blog!
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