A question for all artists/anthropologists

[brettw]

If I asked a random person in the street to draw a person they'd draw a stick figure. If I asked them to draw the sun, they'd draw a circle with maybe "shine lines" coming out of it. These are a bunch of standard ideograms. My question is: Because these ideograms are based on a visual representation of the object, do all cultures (throughout all

Comments

[maga_dogg]

I think the answer is 'yes, but the rules for drawing a stick figure vary culturally'. It's difficult to extrapolate from cave art, since this was obviously done by the contemporary equivalent of art professionals, but there are several obvious ways to draw a stick-figure. For instance, you can draw the arms and legs as two down-curving lines and then add the torso and neck as a vertical line connecting the two.

There are, IIRC, more universal, trans-cultural rules governing how very small children draw - in particular, when they stop drawing people as a blob with limbs sticking out of it, and give them a separate head. So stick-figures assume a certain level of artistic sophistication, believe it or not.

One thing I noticed in Botswana was that Anglophone kids, when asked to draw a face, drew an egg-shape and put eyes, nose, mouth inside it; Batswana children drew faces in profile with a single line. The stick figure you or I would draw would be represented as full-face; a lot of cultures represent stick-figures as side-on by

[brettw]

heh. Cool stuff. Cheers!

[a_vivid_dreamer]

i don't know, but here is a snippet of data for you

[a_vivid_dreamer]

ps. some of the etchings were dated at 25000 yrs old. the stencils were maybe only a few hundred years old. the paintings 9000 years maybe.

[brettw]

Nice! That must have been quite an experience. Being next to something so fantastically old would be unreal. The etchings sound crazy.

Thanks for that.