AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL ART
Keywords: Shape, Color, Line
Activity: Aboriginal Bark Painting
Objectives: Gain an understanding of the Aboriginal culture and the
function of their art and to tell the story of who they are as a group.
Background of Australian Aborigines:
• In Australia, the native people are known as Aborigines. Some of the
Aborigines tribes live today as they did thousands of years ago,
primitively.
• Aborigines use art as a way to communicate and tell stories much like
the primitive cave artists.
• These stories taught about life including birth, love, food gathering,
hunting, warfare, marriage and death. The storytellers would use a
combination of art forms such as painting, singing, music and dancing.
• Didgeridoo players often played music as the storyteller tells the
story. Sometimes the stories were a secret and only certain members
of the tribe were allowed to know the contents. The artist would cover
the picture with dots as a way to camouflage the meaning. Only those
in the know were able to decipher the hidden pictures within.
Dot Painting: is the traditional visual art form of the Aborigines in the
Western Central Desert of Australia. They would use these Dot
Paintings as a guide as they told their story.
• Aborigine artists would use homemade paints and pencils to create
the images on sheets of bark.
• The artist would often spend more time selecting and treating the
bark and on and his paint palette and brushes than he would spend on
the actual painting process.
• Sheets of reddish bark are removed from trees during the rainy
monsoon season to reveal a thin fibrous layer or sheet. This sheet was
cured by fire and flattened under heavy rocks.
• Bark painters of long ago would work with the basis earth pigments:
red, black, yellow and white. These were collected from various natural
forms, (flowers, grasses, dirt, crushed seeds etc) and mixed with a
fixative such as honey, flower juice, bees wax or egg yolk.
• Brushes are made from strips of stringy bark or green twigs. These
were shaped into bristles by whittling or chewing the tips. The artist
will use several different shaped brushes for one painting.
• Today bright colors are more common with the use of acrylic
paint…..but traditional dot painters still use natural pigments.
Discussing the Print:
Encourage the students to describe the work of art.
What do you see? Can you see shapes that have been hidden in the
dots?
What story might the Aboriginal artist be trying to tell us? Create a
story with your class.
Discuss the colors chosen by the artist. Ask the students what in
nature might the artist may have used if this was created long ago and
acrylic paints were not yet available.
Project #1: Aboriginal Bark Painting
Materials: Brown construction paper, animal templates, tempera
paints, colors black for animal, red, yellow orange, blue etc, brushes,
cotton swabs (Q-tips), pencils and black markers.
Before beginning: demonstrate using the tempura paints and cotton
swabs to create dots.
Swabs are to be used like a rubber stamp. Advise not to scrub or use
the cotton swab like a bristle brush.
Process: 1. Handout brown paper (bark) and one template per student.
Students can choose an animal template, then trace it. Next they paint
the animal with black paint. Show samples, of finished artwork.
2. Students can then begin to use the cotton swabs to outline the
animal figure with dots. Use only one color for these dots.
3. Next, the student can camouflage the picture using dots of other
colors, then, students can make various background patterns like
flowers, various shapes with different colors.
Recommendation: As the students are painting you may choose to play
didgeridoo music in the background. Ask your teacher for assistance to
download on classroom computer.