Aboriginal Art- Few Facts
Aboriginal art is the oldest art form that is ever known. This art form is more than 50,000 years old. The tribe aborigines created this art work. Aborigines are from Australia. These people are closely associated with very well known term ” boomerang”. A boomerang is now used by kids as a toy. However, Aborigines used it to hunt their daily food. These Aborigines are extremely talented in carving and painting. Aboriginal art is being practiced by them for thousands of years now. After 1970’s, Aboriginal art form has taken a new curve as commercialized art form. This way, this art form is the newest commercialized art form, though it is the oldest in existence.
Here are few Aboriginal Art Facts :
Aboriginal art works are in existence from thousands of years. There are few rock carvings which are more than thirty thousand years old. These paintings are all well narrators of stories. There is another belief in existence that the Aborigines had no script or language so they carved these rocks to tell their stories and to express what they feel. In another sense Aborigines are the oldest group of people who have come across the challenge of communicating. Their paintings and carvings are much appreciated because they express much more than a person can communicate using script or language.
One of the most famous and well known rock painting by Aborigines, is Bradshaw painting. These are admired by worldwide art lovers because of the intensity that these paintings show. Aborigines have a belief that birds carved the rocks using their beaks. When finally they started bleeding , they used their tails and painted the carved rocks. This is has been one of the most ancient stories which is still believed. They also used stencils at one point. Paint/ color was poured on the stencils , to leave an image on the rocks.
Another very old form of Aboriginal art is the bark paintings. These are the most beautiful form of Aboriginal art works. However, due to the kind of material that is used for creation, these are very delicate in nature and cannot sustain for long term. This is the reason, today we have very less number of bark paintings available. These are the ones which are created in the latest times. The older ones have demised in the natural process. These paintings are created using the perishable things like tree stumps, bark and carved logs. Hence, they lose their existence faster than the other types of paintings.
The old times paintings created by Aborigines revolve around what they saw in their times. These paintings very much looked like a bed time story. They narrated stories using their paintings about kookaburras, crocodiles and Kangaroos. Few paintings also narrated about skeletons of people, organs of different animals etc.
This art form is very much close to mother nature. The colors used are natural shades like brown, yellow and red. They also used pipe clay on the painting wherever it needed to get white shade. The need of black shade was fulfilled using charcoal. Creating Charcoal was easy because they just had to burn the wood. Dot painting also is another type in which the Aborigines expressed their lives. The oldest dot paints were created using natural pigments extracted from seeds and plants. Dot painting is very interesting art form where an image is created using thousands of dots just dropped in an order to depict the image.
Though these paintings are the oldest art forms, they depict a lot about the culture then. They also depict that the thirst to express/communicate is greater than the difficulty of not being equipped with right script and language. Today, after being commercialized, the Aborigines are more valued for their worth in Aboriginal art form.