T
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Posts: 336
|
T
Sven I could not agree more, if they are from the East it’s the Far East.
Most all carvings from overseas leave little to be desired, they tend to emphasize the wrong elements and play down the important aspects of a Tiki, and they always look wrong or off.
In this case I suspect they are trying (hard) to be exact but for whatever reason these carvers have a very bad (small?) 2-D piece of reference, they are interpreting and adding what they feel are exotic elements and carving styles. If you look at the piece on E-bay obviously it’s supposed to be a Hawaiian God but look at what they did or did not include. First the carving proportions are backwards and it looks like it was worked upside down and they ran out of wood at the squished head, the legs are way to long, the belly is too fat, it looks like it has breasts as apposed to a jutting chest, everything is rounded unlike the originals which could have passed for modern cubist sculpture, the head dress looks like ropes which get continually smaller until they become the eyes which are totally undefined as if the carver had no understanding of what it was he was supposed to be making, again this tells me the person doing this had no way to relate to what they were viewing, you can also see he “got” the teeth as teeth and these were carved with a certain confidence but unfortunately not the correct figure 8 symmetry. Having said this (and I could go on) it is the best one of these things I’ve seen, where ever these things come from.
The first batch of “Bali Hai” carvings is the saddest group of (Tiki) carvings ever, all I can think is what a waste of wood, the poor tree probably had to grow for hundreds of years in an exciting jungle before it was chopped down and had this curse put upon it. I realize I am opinionated but for the life of me can not understand how anyone thinks these things even remotely look interesting or Tiki. Another thing that gives away the foreign origin of these is their price, you couldn’t buy the wood commercially (let alone pay and adult in the U.S. for the time to carve this) and yet the same ones come up a few times a year. It looks like the E-bay one might mark a change in the old version. Also think how Westerners (Americans) interpret Tiki, even when poorly done, they totally focus on different weird aspects of the “God”, giant teeth, or a crazy scariness, for instance.
I could go on and on…
My very best Alohas
Bosko
|
