Art as Healing: Aborigines find expression.

This is a painting by Aboriginal artist Angelina Pwerle, “Bush Plum” (2013) (all images courtesy of Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, and the artists)

I found it fascinating that Aboriginal artists have been so attuned to aspects of philosophy like the infinite and our place in it, that they have used art to express their concepts of three-dimensionality, undefined and borderless space in these works.

I am reminded of the work of Mark Rothko when looking at the depths of "Bush Plum". When asked how far away from his paintings one should be to get the optimum experience, he said "eighteen inches".

I am also quite sure that the meditative process of producing these works has been a cathartic experience, which has been a process of release of what may be inherited trauma of many generations of persecution and violence.

Also fascinating for me is that they do not use their art to graphically address the violence enacted on them as a people, but rather have leapfrogged that era and stayed true to their traditional concepts of reality, connection with the Earth and unfolding Nature in interacting with the deeper world of emotion and spirituality.