Other Art

Australian Aboriginal art is art done by Australian Aborigines, covering art that pre-dates European colonisation as well as contemporary art by Aborigines based on traditional culture. more...

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It includes a wide variety of media including painting, wood carving, sculpture and ceremonial clothing, as well as artistic embellishments found on weaponry and tools.

Art is one of the key rituals of Aboriginal culture and was used to mark territory, record history, and tell stories about the dreamtime.

Aboriginal painting

Traditionally, paints were often made from water or spittle mixed with ochre and other rock pigments. Painting was then performed on persons, rock walls or bark (particular that of the paperbark gum). Tools used included primitive brushes, sticks, fingers and even a technique of spraying the paint directly out of the mouth onto the medium resulting in an effect similar to modern spraypaint. Aboriginal Art can be made up of a series of dots lines or just the outline of a shape.

There are a wide variety of styles of Aboriginal art. Three common types are the cross-hatch or X-ray art from the Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory, in which the skeletons and viscera of the animals and humans portrayed are drawn inside the outline, as if by cross-section; dot-painting where intricate patterns, totems and/or stories are created using dots; and stencil art, particular using the motif of a handprint. More simple designs of straight lines, circles and spirals, with the occasional zig zag persist throughout the work of Australian Aborigines. These are thought to be the origins of "modern" Aboriginal Art.

One type of Aboriginal painting is known as the Bradshaws, some ancient rock art which appears on caves in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They are named after the European pastoralist, Joseph Bradshaw, who discovered them in 1891. Dampier, Western Australia also has the world's largest collection of petroglyphs, another ancient style of aboriginal art. Traditional aboriginal art is composed of organic colours and materials, but modern artists often use synthetic paints when creating aboriginal styles.

"Dotting" or "Dot Painting"

The so-called 'dot painting" refers in large part to the origins of the Papunya painting movement of the 1970s. The dots were used to cover secret-sacred ceremonies. Originally, the paintings were used in addition to the oral history of Aboriginal dreamings and so they were made for cultural purposes and not the art market. The dots are, in effect, a form of camouflage:

"In 1972, the artists succeeded in forming their own company with an Aboriginal Name: Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd...however a time of disillusionment followed as artists were criticised by their peers for having revealed too much of their sacred heritage. Secret designs restricted to a ritual context were now in the market place, made visible to kardiya outsiders and Aboriginal women. In response to these objections, all detailed depictions of human figures, fully decorated tjurungas (bullroarers) and ceremonial paraphernalia were removed or modified. Such designs and their 'inside' meanings were not to be written down and 'traded'. Any contravention broke the immutable plan of descent, the link of the initiated men with his totemic ancestor through his father and his father's father. From 1973 to 1975, Papunya Tula artists sought to camouflage overt references to ceremony and became reticent. They revealed less of the sacred heart of their culture. The openness of the Bardon era was at an end. Dotting and over-dotting, as an ideal means of concealing or painting over dangerous, secret designs, became a fashion at this stage. The art was made public, watered down for general exhibition, pointing to the uniqueness of the Geoffrey Bardon years - which like innocence, cannot be rediscovered." (Judith Ryan in Bardon 1991: ix-x)

Read more at Wikipedia.org