An Australian Dream Painting for $10

JS from Santa Barbara sent me a “dotted” dream painting, with what she describes as illegible signatures. I asked her to bring it to my office for me to identify the medium. I guessed gouache, a heavy, opaque watercolor paint made from natural umbers/ochres or metal compounds (titanium/cobalt/cadmium). In person I saw evidence of traditionally made gouache colors, and a predominance of pale yellow to dark reddish brown ochre.

This painting serves as a great example of Australian Aboriginal contemporary art. The art world rediscovered this ancient tradition in the early 1970’s in a remote schoolhouse studio in the barren Western Desert of Australia. The cultural pride of the Aboriginal communities of “Dreaming” art is perhaps the last great art movement of the 20th century, so says my favorite art critic, Robert Hughes.

Dream Painting at a Thrift Store

JS found this “Dream Painting,” the name of this style, at Catholic Charities Thrift Store in Santa Barbara for $10. (Learn How to Look at a Thrift Store Painting.) Many people don’t know how to identify this distinctive style. Let alone know what unique meaning, and value this work possesses. JS thought it a kid’s piece! Today 5,000-7,000 Aboriginal people work as known studio artists in the “Dream” style.

The “Dream” and the artist’s animal or psychic totem determines WHERE the mother feels her first stirrings of her pregnancy. Then she looks to her landscape and her child receives the spirit of their totem ancestor, and this ancestor’s ‘dreaming’ of this place. These artists believe each thing in nature is part human and vise-versa. So these totem ancestors started humankind, and still exist in dreams of that part of their landscape.

The beings began the tradition of Dream painting by leaving paintings on rocks and caves. At the being’s battle sites hills originated from their corpses then lakes came from their shed blood. The ancient humans showed their respect for their ancestors by ritual tales and body painting in this patterning, including the shapes of the ancestor and his land.

Traditionally, three or four colored ochre stone powders from the Dream Land are mixed with blood, human or kangaroo, and saliva. This resulted in my trouble identify the paint medium. The blood red is hugely important in this art as well as in funeral practices of the Aboriginal community.

An example of such an ancient image:

In West Kimberley, the totem of a bird-man called the “gwion-gwion” is painted in red on rock overhangs and in ancient caves. In one original blood-from-stone myth, the gwion-gwion pecks at rocks after insect meals and draws blood. I use the term “draws” blood in both meaning of “draw.” So red ochre for these desert peoples symbolizes the liquid blood of ancestors.

Finally, evidence of this style’s age exists in archeological sites at Lake Mungoin New South Wales. There blood red pits hold red ochre painted bones, staining the desert ground pink. The oldest sites, perhaps the oldest human funerary site ever found, dates to 40k years ago. In another burial site an 18,000 year artist’s ochre palette was discovered. Stenciled images of boomerangs, ancestor totems and human hands are some of the oldest images in art history.

So JS¸ your painting for $10 is very special, and shows a history dating back at least 4,0000 years. It’s worth $10,000-$12,000.