Post #273105 by bigbrotiki on Sat, Dec 16, 2006 8:47 PM

On 2006-12-16 16:39, TikiPhil wrote:

A.) Tikis should not be painted like clowns

Like this?

That's right, THAT paint job on a wood carving would be awful. It's a different story with mugs. Mugs were OBVIOUSLY not "authentic" artifacts, never pretended to be. And Florian Gabriel told me how Crane was egging him on against his will to ad more color to the warrior mug.

When artifacts like the Steven Crane mug and the Tiki Bob mug are as inexorably embedded into the history of Tiki culture, using them as examples for un-Tiki is ignoring their context, like saying Don The Beachcomber was not Tiki, or such and such lounge would not have been Tiki once the Tikis would be removed. A moot point.

Like these mugs or not, their historic Polynesian pop context is a fact, but they stand for classic Tiki culture's aesthetic extremes, and as such are so unique that they are more exceptions than examples. To try to use them as license for a stylistic free-for-all would demonstrate what I mourned earlier in this thread: A lack of a basic ability to differentiate, and lack of an understanding of Tiki culture. (And yes, I am talking of MY understanding of Tiki culture, as I defined it.)

The basic color scheme of primitive art should still be one of the dark, brooding childhood of man, when mankind's crayons were limited. When Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily mounted their Anaheim Museum Tiki exhibit in the mid-90s, they made a Tiki coloring book for sale in the gift store for it, and it came with ONE crayon: The color BROWN.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2006-12-16 21:25 ]