Aboriginal Painting

Art of the Australian Outback

Nov 13, 2009

Aboriginal painting, sometimes described as dot painting or desert painting, is a thriving artform rooted in thousands of years of Australia's indigenous culture.

In the past few decades, the art of Australia’s aboriginal people has grown to prominence in the Western world and been transformed into an important contemporary art trend, while maintaining deeply enduring ties to the past.

World’s Oldest Artform

The term Aborigine refers to a loose confederation of the many differentiated groups indigenous to the Australian continent. The origins of the Aboriginal people truly are shrouded in the mists of time: rock and cave paintings have been found to date back about 40,000 years, more than twice as old as the European paleolithic drawings at Lascaux and Altamira, and even predating the prehistoric finds at Chauvet Cave by a staggering 10,000 years. Little more solid than conjecture can be established about where the culture sprang from, or indeed how the Aboriginal people came to inhabit Australia.

What is known is that, in the absence of written language, the culture has been preserved over an astonishing timespan through oral tradition — aided to a very strong degree by the systems of graphic representation that have survived to the present in Aboriginal painting.

What can be referred to as modern Aboriginal painting (the distinction being the use of portable, commodifiable materials such as canvas and board) dates back to 1971, when a schoolteacher named Geoffrey Bardon, drawing on the local artistic tradition, started a painting group in Papunya, a small Aboriginal community in Australia’s Central Western Desert.

Aboriginal Art and Culture

Aboriginal culture, although diverse in aspects like language and painting style across different groups, is universally dominated by a complex belief system that is tied to the land with an abiding intimacy.

“Dreamings” refer both to the stories that shape the Aboriginal culture and to the ancestral beings around whom the stories — and indeed all aspects of the culture — revolve. Dreamings relate specifically to physical sites, often of extreme spiritual significance, such as Uluru and Katatjuta; and are linked by “songlines,” which trace a network connecting the different groups across the land.

As Patrick Corbally Stourton explains in his book Songlines and Dreamings, “In a sense, the paintings are religious maps of what each artist calls ‘my country’.”

Abstract Art and Religious Representation

Aboriginal art can appear on first inspection abstract; but every painting literally tells a story and is rich in stylised symbols, all in the representation of dreamings. Many of the symbols are in fact quite blatantly figurative, yet in a manner whose disorienting unfamiliarity inadvertently underlines the abstract effect: Aboriginal painting is always executed on a flat horizontal surface (i.e. never upright, as on an easel), and this is a significant reflection of its overhead perspective — elements are represented as seen from above. It is a unique perspective in world art, and hints at the fascinating singularities of the Aboriginal worldview.

Toward the late 1970s, as modern Aboriginal painting rose to prominence and popularity with Western viewers, deliberate abstraction became introduced partly as a result of religious prohibition. Aboriginal tradition has taboos against the revelation of certain sacred representations to the uninitiated; in the mid-seventies, religious leaders proscribed the portrayal of some dreamings. Partial abstraction or obscuration in the form of dots was one way in which the prohibition was addressed.

It is interesting to note that the proliferation of dots, which in the Western view was to become so intimately associated with Aboriginal art that it is often erroneously labelled “dot painting,” has no intrinsic meaning at all, but is used only in this abstracting manner or as a decorative or emphatic element — a kind of visual punctuation.

Parallels can be drawn with Islamic art, whose religious tradition prohibits figurative representation and so in response has fostered a highly complex and intricately beautiful geometric-based abstraction.

Contemporary Aboriginal Painting

It is to some extent this apparent abstraction that has made the Aboriginal painting aesthetic so popular with a contemporary market. It is a visual language that we are comfortable with on two levels: emerging at a time when Western painting was suffering an awkward transitional crisis of identity after Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Aboriginal painting speaks of a rich tradition in an overtly visual way that is elementally recognisable whilst intriguingly unfamiliar. Aboriginal painting is at the same time both deeply spiritual and highly aesthetic — satisfying to the eye, and to the soul.

Some Notable Aboriginal Artists:

Selected Bibliography:

The copyright of the article Aboriginal Painting in Modern Art History is owned by Shona Black. Permission to republish Aboriginal Painting in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.