SD Cards art prints brisbane australia

Never too old to start painting

Judges Nici Cumpston, Danie Mellor and Judith Ryan, together with the members of the initial selection panel, have thus re-engineered the awards, once the sole indigenous art competition of significance, now just one showcase in a crowded field.

The emphasis is on refined, highly wrought work: it has become a fine art show, an aesthetic delight as much as a celebration of ancestral law and culture.

Yet law and culture, in today's closely managed art centres, routinely translate into attractive, market-courting works. Remembered tradition appears in new guise: it is re-enacted on canvas and in sculpture, as visual beauty and grace.

How striking the pattern is, and how lavish the result, in a contemporary art world with very different enthusiasms.

How telling, too, the focus on remote communities with surviving traditional cultures, and the resultant geographic pattern.

The numbers in this year's NATSIAA tell the tale: in the field of finalists selected for the exhibition, which opened last Thursday night at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, are no fewer than 25 desert works and 19 barks, sculptures and carvings from Arnhem Land.

A handful of other pieces emanate from the Torres Strait Islands, the third great focus of the Aboriginal art movement in its current phase.

Work from prominent indigenous artists of non-traditional background scarcely features: most such figures opt these days for a contemporary gallery setting.

The reduction in NATSIAA's scope this year comes at a time of sharp contraction in the wider art market; a time of despondency in the continual policy debates over remote area Aboriginal affairs. There was an exiguous mid-week first-night crowd for what was once the gala evening of the Darwin culture week.

Beauty, though, is not just its own advocate: it lifts the eye and mind from griefs and troubles, and this may help account for the tone of this year's show.

What is art?

Australia

Art

The Art Spirit

Art, a brief history