Sustained Investigation #10

Sustained Investigation #10: “!Kung San”

Oil Paints on Canvas

12” x 12”

My painting depicts a smiling woman, hailing from the !Kung San tribe in Namibia. I have always been fascinated with languages so I was instantaneously attracted to these people. The people of the !Kung San tribe are famous for their clicking (Khoisan) language. These clicks function as consonants and there can be near 200 different consonants in these languages. This language and culture is particularly attractive because it is one of the oldest in the world- the origin of people, cultures, and languages to come. Their culture is equally intriguing as their language. Still living as hunter-gatherers, these !Kung San people have quite advanced social norms in contrast to their ancient way of living. In !Kung San societies, women and men share equal status. Although women usually end up staying at home to care for the children while men hunt, these roles are very interchangeable in their society and it is not abnormal to see a man caring for children while the woman hunts. I completed this piece using oil paints on canvas. For this piece, I wanted to focus on using expressions in my work as most of the portraits tend to be slate faced. I also wanted to experiment working with a different skin tone. After a granite outline, I mixed the colours for my portrait using scarlet red, ph.blue, raw umber, and mild pale yellow (lacking cadmium and burnt Sienna). I ended up using a lot more yellow and red in the painting than I originally thought to try and match the natural skin tone of the !Kung San people. It was a struggle to come up with the facial expression without a proper smiling reference, especially since the facial structure of these people is dissimilar to my own. For my next project I would like to continue working on facial expressions and backgrounds.