Monday 17 December 2012

An art dealer has been explaining the essence of Aboriginal art to me. Roughly-speaking, it's to do with a certain amount of dreams that have been handed down and how they're expressed and interpreted through art.

I then got a guided tour of her gallery, which is stuffed to the gunwales with rather fine paintings; even if they all seem to be covered in dots. My eyes were going a bit funny with it all. "Yes there are a lot of dots which I think can be traced back to when the indigenous people used to draw in the sand. They'd take a bit of food, chew it into a ball, then 'dot' with it", she tried to explain. "If you stare at the paintings for too long, they can be almost hallucinogenic can't they?"  Too right.

Fired up, but without enough readies to buy one of her paintings, I searched out an Aborginial centre and bought a lovely writing pad with a stunning cover design (acrylic on linen) by Angelina Ngale from Ahalpere, Utopia Region in Northern Territory.  I had to have some of her work as, let's face it, there aren't too many utopias here on earth. www.mbantua.com



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