Avea’s explains vision to promote culture through art

National

Benson Avea, an artist from Eastern Highlands, hopes to promote the diverse cultures of PNG by using certain colours in his drawings.
Avea said he used only black in his drawings because it  was the main colour that our ancestors used  for facial or body painting during special ceremonies.
He  used two additional colours,  brown, which he said depicted the colour of skin  of native Papua New Guineans, and white which, he said, was the colour of the surface used  in the past to draw on.
Avea is a contracted artist who draws flora and fauna that are
studied at a research centre in
the Madang, New Guinea Binatang.
Avea specialises in insect drawing and draws mainly for conservational purposes.
He said he had chosen to use a different technique because he wanted his art to be similar to how it was done in the past.
“In the past, our ancestors never drew real images of man, what they drew was only a stick figure of images,” Avea said
What they did was simple and they only used the colour black on a white surface.
“What we see today in traditional drawings of artefacts and images have a mixture of modified
colours, which do not portray
how it was really done in the
past.”
Avea was recently invited by the University of South Bohemia in Czech Republic to draw a storyboard depicting the work of New Guinea Binatang for the Biology Centre in the university.