Dot painting

The Aborigines of Australia are such an amazing people, and most of my students had never heard of them before this week. We started Monday with a documentary to help them understand the significance behind some Aboriginal customs and ancient art. Accordingly, we began our own dot paintings.

The Aborigines have symbols that communicate meaning in their art. A single arch symbolizes a person, concentric circles are a symbol for water hole, diagonal lines represent rain, and arrows can be spears or emus. Acrylic dot paintings became popular in 1960's, but dots are used to create ancient rock art as well.

A lot of students chose to use black or another dark color as a background to provide contrast for the lighter colors. We dipped unused pencil erasers into house paint to make the dots.

The student who made this painting has prosthetic eyes. The latex paint dots and puddles were somewhat tactile. When she felt her painting the next day she said, "Oooooo. This is really nice!"

Because these paintings didn't take very long, we continued making dot paintings with dot makers and puff paint. This project was a really fun way to bridge ancient and contemporary non-objective art.