Aboriginal Art

                                     Aboriginal Art

                          Emily Kngwarreye

Emily Kngwarreye, who we saw briefly in the Art and Clothing post, is the most celebrated Australian aboriginal artist.  She only began painting with modern acrylic paints in the late 1980s.  At the time she was in her late 70’s.  The art materials were brought to her location, the Utopia farmstead, an arid interior area, slightly north of the center of Australia.  Enlightened individuals, organizations, and governments at that time, had a renewed interest in indigenous peoples including the Australian aborigines and the Canadian eskimos. 

A recurring theme in Emily’s paintings is the portrayal of yam tracks.  The yam plant sprawls and has lax stems above ground and runners going underground to the yams.  Yams were a revered reliable staple especially in times of drought.  Please look at Emily’s painting called Yam Dreaming. The word dreaming seems to refer to people or animals or plants thinking about their community and their ancestors.  That use of dreaming corresponds to what we might call reverie.

Please see another photo showing Emily working on a very large painting intended for the National Museum in Canberra, the capital of Australia.  It was done at Delmore Gallery, set up in the Utopia area to promote and sell Aboriginal art, which it still does.  You can see a photo of  Emily’s completed painting at delmoregallery.com.  

            Gabriella Possum

Another woman Aboriginal artist is Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi who also paints sitting down.  Please look at her painting called Seven Sisters Dreaming. 

 Some names need explaining, starting with possum. There are a number of species of Australian marsupial possums that look somewhat like slimmed koala bears.  They look very different from American Opossums which are also marsupials.  

    Marsupials

How did marsupials come to be in Australia?  Recent DNA research indicates that marsupials originated in South America, where some still exist.  They spread to Australia at a far distant time, roughly 100 million years ago, when South America, Antarctica, and Australia were all joined together and were located at lower latitudes and thus had a temperate climate. 

In a related way, very much later, only about three million years ago, the isthmus of Panama formed, joining the Americas which had been separated, allowing South American creatures including the marsupial Opossums to migrate to North America.

                                            Seven Sisters 

The name Seven Sisters relates to the famous seven star group called the Pleiades easily seen by eye in the Constellation Taurus.  Those names come from the mythology of the Ancient Greeks.  Some constellations are only visible in one hemisphere, but a New Zealand source says the Pleiades are visible there at certain times of the year, so also in Australia.  Furthermore, the Pleiades are in an interstellar dust cloud in our galaxy and so there is a glowing nebula effect around each star.

I think Gabriella Possum took some liberties with the alignment of the stars and she plumped them up which seems artistically appropriate.  Those radiating streamers also correspond to a visual effect and the sky itself has a wonderful texture.

As an aside, please note that conventional portrayals of constellations are of little help in spotting them outdoors.  There is a book called  The stars: a new way to see them by H.A.Rey that shows each constellation as a stick figure making it easily identifiable.

Lastly, the word dreaming shows up again.  We had yams dreaming and now stars dreaming.  The dreaming can refer to ancestors or to community but could have an extended meaning of being conscious of your own self, like being able to see yourself from outside.  

            Museums

 Aboriginal art is on display in all the major Australian museums. In the USA, there is the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art collection of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  In Europe, there is the AAMU Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands.  Please see my photo taken in their entrance lobby, of a free standing aboriginal sculpture group.  AAMU has art from Arnhem Land, mostly populated by Aborigines, on the far North coast of  Australia.  The art from there is more traditional dot and stroke painting ‒ different than Emily’s.  

What Is the connection between The Netherlands and Australia?   In the 1600s the Dutch captured the far east spice trade by force from the Portuguese.  Dutch ships explored and traded widely throughout south east Asia.  In 1623 a Dutch ship, named the Arnhem came to the area now called Arnhem Land in the far north of Australia.

                Glen Namundja

See the photo of Glen Namundja from Arnhem Land making a more traditional painting with dense dots and strokes.  No easel needed ‒ and look at that shirt.  By the way,  Qantas, the Australian airline, has decorated its planes with different aboriginal designs ‒ traditional ones and Emily’s type.  It is interesting to see how they wrapped the design onto the fuselage.  The planes are impressive and can be seen on the Qantas website or by image search.  Qantas also has the best safety record of any airline in the world.

                            

DNA and radiometric dating point to proto aborigines coming to Australia around 65,000 years ago ‒ long before proto Native American Indians arrived in the new world around 14,000 years ago.  Ancient aboriginal rock paintings and carvings date from that early time ‒ long before the cave paintings in Europe.  

We have no photos here, but besides conventional depictions of animals, early aborigines  produced so-called x-ray paintings.  Within the outline of an animal, they show the skeleton and viscera.  Further, those paintings show animals and flightless birds that went extinct soon after the aborigines arrived  ‒  probably killed off by the humans, as has happened repeatedly elsewhere. 

Reference.  Why are there so many marsupials in Australia? by Laura Geggel at livescience.com