Posts Tagged ‘Painting’
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Nicolas Rothwell; 16/3/10
It was mid-April 2003 when a young researcher named Judy Lovell first met Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, the best-known artist of Santa Teresa community just south of Alice Springs. The connection forged between Lovell and Mrs Wallace, the name by which the artist is known, was immediate and intuitive. They began sharing stories, impressions and ideas. Their tie deepened into a bond of friendship. Lovell became the long-term art co-ordinator for the little community, which specialises in intricately designed and brightly coloured ceramics and works on canvas. Gradually she grew to be the principal recorder of Mrs Wallace’s memories, reflections and epic tales. The two decided to begin working on a bilingual book project, in English and Mrs Wallace’s Arrernte language, and majestically illustrated, binding art with country, individual artist with old tradition. Listen Deeply, Let These Stories In, published late last year by the Alice Springs-based IAD Press, is a striking production: a kind of multimedia art project in print, complete with photographs of rock engravings and sweeping desert landscapes, accounts of bush fruits and weather phenomena, and an accompanying CD that captures the rise and fall of Mrs Wallace’s voice as she recounts the fine details of her story cycles.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Painting, Religion
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Nicolas Rothwell; 29/10/09
When painting began in the small Pitjantjatjara community of Irrunytju in Western Australia in mid-2001, there was a degree of surprise mixed in with the excitement as the flow of jewel-like works began. Painting? In that region of the western desert so long resistant to the depiction of traditional forms and symbols in art for outside eyes? Since then, the painting movement has spread at speed through the little communities of the Pitjantjatjara lands, which cluster around the border point where the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia meet. New art centres have been set up in the main settlements and even in little fringing outstations, while old craft workshops have been given fresh support and are nurturing the latest stars of the Aboriginal art world. In the space of a few years, a painting school quite unfamiliar to collectors has come to prominence. Today the area, known in administrative parlance as the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara or, more easily, APY lands, is widely viewed as the last frontier of traditional desert art.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Painting
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Monday, August 24th, 2009
Nicolas Rothwell; 24/8/09
What are these colours amid the shadowed greenery? What are the sounds of chant and dance rhythm in the dark? Here, at the rainforest-surrounded Tanks Art Centre on the northern fringe of Cairns, in a set of converted World War II oil storage bunkers, a rich enterprise in Aboriginal art was making its debut over the course of a hectic weekend. Tradition, innovation; grand ambitions, good intentions, anguished cultural debate: the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair was careful to offer its crowds of visitors an intriguing, multiplicit diet of image and sensation. Director Michael Snelling wanted a fair that was a festival: not just art on the walls, but art enacted as well. Dancers from Cape York and the Torres Strait were on hand: art from their communities hung in well-lit exhibition spaces. Museum curators, collectors and gallerists came: so did the public, more than 2500 visitors a day, five times what the organisers had hoped for. The event marked the great crescendo of Queensland’s newest exercise in cultural engineering: more than $10 million has been committed to strengthening the art of the Cape and far north.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Arts, Australia, Painting
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Friday, August 21st, 2009
Ashleigh Wilson; 21/8/09
Art dealers will be able to pay artists with alcohol or secondhand vehicles but will be forced to declare their agreed value under a wide-ranging code of conduct for the Aboriginal art business. The final copy of the code, obtained by The Australian but still to be signed off by federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett, sets out minimum standards for dealers, agents and artists in an attempt to freeze out unscrupulous operators. It prohibits dealers from “taking advantage” of artists or their representatives, acting in an unfair, bullying or threatening manner and exerting undue influence. Dealers must act in good faith, which includes not promoting the “dealer’s interests to the detriment of the artist”.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Painting, Trade
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Saturday, May 16th, 2009
Lindsay Murdoch; 16/5/09
A collection of priceless and culturally sensitive Aboriginal paintings that has languished unseen in vaults for almost 40 years will soon be exhibited in the Northern Territory. But an ambitious plan to take the collection, known as the Papunya Tula Boards, on an international tour in 2012 has been scuppered by the territory’s most senior indigenous politician, Alison Anderson. “These priceless pieces should be first viewed in the country of their birth,” Ms Anderson, the territory’s Arts Minister, said.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, Painting
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Saturday, March 7th, 2009
Lindsay Murdoch; 7/3/09
Hidden for almost 200 years, a rock painting of an early Australian explorer, believed to be Ludwig Leichhardt, is to be exposed to non-Aboriginal people for the first time. The Aboriginal artist who drew the painting on the ceiling of a rock shelf in rugged stone country in Arnhem Land had never before seen a horse or a white man, experts believe. The artist reveals his fascination with a four-legged animal that lifts its tail to urinate, has knee and chest guards and has a weird-looking figure sitting on its back.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Painting
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Saturday, September 20th, 2008
20/9/08
A vast wall of more than 1500 Aboriginal rock art paintings has been found by archaeologists in north-west Arnhem Land, including drawings of European sailing ships and World War II battleships. First found in the 1970s, the rock art was lost to the world until a doctoral student at the Australian National University, Daryl Guse, rediscovered them with the help of a local elder. The 1500 works in the Djulirri rock shelter in the Wellington Range chronicle Aboriginal contact with Maccassan traders from Sulawesi, and Europeans from the early sailship days right through to WWII. Alongside paintings said to be more than 15,000 years old, there are works that depict the biplane, a bicycle and gun, Fairfax newspapers report.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Painting
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Leesha McKenny; 30/7/08
John Ioannou agrees he is one of the most controversial figures in indigenous art and his reputation has sometimes landed him in hot water. Last year police interrupted his initiation into an indigenous community north of Alice Springs and threw him into a paddy wagon after a new arts centre co-ordinator had called them. She had heard of a white man without a permit in the remote community and said it was “Ioannou”. “They handcuffed me, put me in the back of the van, drove me 20 metres across the road, basically just to humiliate me,” he says. “I was released on bail and given four hours to leave the communities … The next day I went to another community with all the major elders and they came out there again and were told I was on sacred grounds and I was initiated and they couldn’t do anything about it.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Painting, Trade
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Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Steve Dow, 27/7/08
On the Tanami Road in Central Australia, the distant western MacDonnell Ranges all pink and blue like a Namatjira watercolour, six wedge-tailed eagles surround their breakfast on the bitumen. The winged predators look up defiantly as a four-wheel-drive brakes to stop, slowly abandoning the bloody big red kangaroo carcass to flap away across the mulgas and spinifex. These powerful opportunists will be back. Some 290 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs – the last 100 a road of bronze sand and rocks – Warlpiri man Shorty Jangala Robertson, believed to be more than 80 years of age, sits cross-legged on a concrete veranda, all concentration as he applies light blue dots to a dark blue canvas. “Ngapa,” he says, looking up. Water.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Painting, Trade
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Saturday, July 19th, 2008
Vivien Johnson; 19/7/08, The Australian, No Internet Text; Vivien Johnson is professor of new media narrative and theory at the University of NSW, and curator of the exhibition Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World; Benjamin Genocchio; Hardie Grant
Much has changed in the Aboriginal art world since Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines pioneered the genre to which Ben Genocchio’s Dollar Dreaming is the latest addition. Chatwin’s best-selling chronicle of his travels in the Aboriginal art world was written in the more slow-moving mid-1980s. The boom in Aboriginal art sales had barely begun and the first few Aboriginal artists were just starting to throw off the shackles of collective ethnographic identities and emerge as contemporary artists in their own right.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, Painting
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