PAPUAN ARTISTS 145 



carvings on the canoes and drums. Their paddles too 

 show a very good idea of design, as will be seen from 

 the illustration p. 144. Nothing amused them more 

 than to be provided with a pencil and pieces of paper 

 and to attempt to draw figures. Their efforts were not 

 always very successful, and some of the drawings which 

 I have kept would be quite unrecognisable for what 

 they are, if I had not labelled them at the time. Like 

 the young of civilised races they always preferred to 

 draw the figures of men and women, and some of these 

 are remarkable for having the mouth near the top of 

 the head above the level of the eyes. The method of 

 drawing is very simple ; the pencil is held almost upright 

 on the paper and the outline of the figure, begun at 

 an arm or leg or anywhere indifferently, is drawn in 

 one continuous stroke without removing the pencil 

 from the paper. The end is always rather exciting, 

 like the feat of drawing a pig when you are blindfolded, 

 for the artist is never quite certain of finishing at the 

 point whence he started. Besides human figures they 

 liked drawing dogs, pigs, birds and fishes. Two pictures 

 of a dog and a bird both done by the same man are 

 peculiarly interesting, because they were both drawn 

 upside down. I watched the man making the drawings, 

 and when they were finished I saw that the legs of the 

 creatures were uppermost ; so I turned the papers the 

 right way round and handed them back to him, but 

 he inverted them again and admired them in that position. 

 Curiously enough the same man drew human figures in 

 the correct attitude, head uppermost, so that the state 

 of his mental vision offers rather a puzzling problem. 



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