Art Paints

Welcome to our Australian Aboriginal art investment online gallery in Sydney, Australia

We are an investment art gallery in Sydney offering Indigenous artworks and Aboriginal art rental. Our team of art investing and art rental advisers are experts in financial planning, art wealth management and wealth creation and can help you with art and financial advice.

Review of contemporary Aboriginal art uncovers a significant variety of materials and painting techniques in use. Some are strongly rooted in tradition, for example, the use of ochres in the Kimberley, whilst others embrace of modern media, for example, artists who work with acrylic paints on canvas.

Aboriginal artists have also shown extensive innovation in techniques adopted for both the application of paint and the creation of their designs. Examples include using the crushed end of a stick to produce large smudged dots as well as painting with extremely fine brushes to develop delicate patterns.
 
To express themselves, painters especially rely on their paint and their preferred surface, the choice of which not only affects the finished product, but may also provide a uniqueness to their work.
 
Traditional Aboriginal Painting
 
The most important traditional painting material for Aboriginal artists is ochre, which is abundant across most of Australia. Evidence of its use can be found at many old archaeological sites which is testament to the longevity of this medium across the centuries. Indeed, some ochre finds have been carbon dated with ages between 10,000 and 40,000 years.
 
Ochre is the pigment in traditional Aboriginal paint and is derived from finely textured rock (either crumbly or hard). This rock is intensely coloured by iron oxide and comes in a range of colours from pale yellow to dark, reddish brown, providing a warm, rich colour to Aboriginal artwork.
 
Other traditional pigments commonly used in addition to ochres include charcoal, white and coloured clay and mixtures of blood, feathers, fat and other organic material.
 
Just like that of their Western counterparts, paint used by Aboriginal artists comprises a pigment (ochre/other material) and a binder. To make paint using ochre, the rock was ground up or pulverised, and mixed with water before a binder was added. A traditional binder was spinefex gum which ensured that the paint adhered to its intended surface, whether that was a rock, a person’s skin or more contemporary material.
 
Traditionally, paint was applied to the selected surface in different ways. A fine stick or hair brush could be used; fingers were another application tool especially when body-painting, or artists could blow a fine spray from their mouth over a stencil to achieve a silhouette effect.
 
The main function of stencil images was to make a record of a person’s presence or association with a site. It is no surprise then that stencil images are some of the oldest painted images found in Australia, scattered across the whole of the country.  Used especially in rock art, they typically depict animal tracks, body parts (for example, hands), boomerangs or other traditional tools.
 
Paints were also commonly applied by fingers and hands, especially for ceremonial skin painting, including mortuary ceremonies. This traditional application occurred extensively in central and northern Australia.
In some regions of Australia, other popular traditional choices of painting surface included bark and wood, which would be carefully painted with different brushes to achieve different effects. For example, a sheet of bark would first be covered with a single layer of red ochre, which could include a binder of orchid sap or turtle egg yolk. The main forms and lines in the design could be outlined in black, yellow or white ochre using a brush made of a stick with fine grass or fibres attached.
 
The Modern Aboriginal Painting
 
As alluded to earlier, contemporary Aboriginal artists are innovative in their paint application and design and they now also incorporate a wide variety of modern materials and techniques in their works. Many use acrylic paint and acrylic binder.
 
Acrylic paint is made by suspending pigment in a synthetic resin which acts as a binder to hold the pigment and secure it to the surface.
 
Interest in developing a synthetic paint was instigated in South America, where artists who painted large outdoor murals needed a quick-drying paint resistant to wind, rain and humidity.
 
By the mid-1950s, researchers had developed a way to mix resins with water, thus creating a substance very similar to oil paint, but with many advantages. 
 
Acrylic paints:
  • can be applied at varying thicknesses, for example, thinly like watercolour or much thicker, like oil paints;
  • are more durable, with greater resistance to the effects of light and heat than oil-based paints;
  • are quicker drying, retaining a slightly darker colour when dry than watercolours;
  • are water-based thus removing the need to use solvents; and
  • result in a strong and flexible paint film.
For these reasons, acrylic paints are an especially popular paint to use.
Aboriginal painting has prevailed on rocks throughout Australia for thousands of years, and now the incorporation of modern materials by today’s artists means that more recent Aboriginal works may grace walls throughout the world for many more years to come.

We covered Art Investing, Art as an Asset Class, Art Funds and Art Markets in length in the following pages:

Bookmark/Search this post with: