Dreamtime Art

Dreamtime Art

For thousands of years, Aboriginal people have been creating art, including body and bark painting, clay and wood sculptures, and rock art. Some surviving rock engravings are about 40,000 years old.

Dreamtime 

According to traditional Australian aboriginal belief, the world was created during a magical period known as the Dreamtime. To aboriginals, the dreamtime is not in the past but is a parallel stream of of time running though past.present and future. In the dreamtime, ancestral beings rose from beneath the Earth and wandered across the landscape, creating the mountains, valleys, and rivers we see today.

 

Technique

Ancient Aboriginal painters used earth colours- reds, browns and yellows, black and white- made from natural plants and minerals. A variety of ways were used to apply the paint. Some pictures were painted using fingers, the palm of the hands, sticks or feathers, grasses, chewed twings, narrow strips of stringy bark or palm leave were also used to make brushes. For, stencil designs, the paint was blown out of the mouth  around an object. Aboriginals make paints from natural plants and minerals such as red, yellow and many other colours of ochre. They grind it to powder, mix it with liquid, then paint using barks or sticks.