Colours
Over time, the colours and shape became a key aspect in the overall design. In the late 1968s, the new style was evident. What was once a finger painted creation was now created using bundled twigs with feathers as brushes. The walls are still originally whitewashed but the outlines and colours have significantly changed. The patterns and symbols can be seen today with a rich black outline and a vivid colour inside. There are five main colours represented in these wall paintings which are: red and dark red, yellow to gold, a sky blue, green, and sometimes pink. The colours give an intensified symbolic meaning to the Ndebele. They can mean status or power of the home's owners, offer prayer, announce a marriage in the home, or can even represent a current protest. These wall paintings express an abstract meaning with no real reference to any specific characteristic of their homes. This is the most direct way to show their individual expression to the people outside their far distinct family, showing of the talent and the taste of the mother. The colour white is always used as the background because it makes the bright patterns stand out more.
Read more about this topic: Ndebele House Painting
Famous quotes containing the word colours:
“In a borealic iceberg came Victoria; she
Knew Prince Albert’s tall memorial took the colours of the floreal
And the borealic iceberg;”
—Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)
“When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You’ve no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)