Australian painting, colony to nation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Australian painting, colony to nation - Essay Example The essay "Australian painting, colony to nation" discovers the Australian landscape paintings. Landscape art is an art form that depicts the natural beauty of the scenery. This art involves the capturing of features like mountains, rivers, valleys, forests among many others. On the other hand, contemporary arts are works of art from during the post World War II period to date. The Australian Aboriginal art describes the artistic aspects of the indigenous people of Australia whose way of life was nomadic uncivilized. In short, all these forms of art complement one another in describing what Australian historic art entails. They bring out the evolution of art in this isolated island nation that is rich and wealthy. Therefore, this essay will seek to bring out the history of landscape art in Australia in a sense that it was not a progressive discovery. It will blend ideas on the establishment of changing concepts in building pictures that are more appropriate. It will also the cultural construction that tend to out play one another in the complexity of invention web. Since the pre-colonial period, art has been a way of preserving a community’s heritage and pride. The techniques varied between different communities in the world. The artists in these societies used the locally available materials to try to express their concepts. Over the years, civilization led to the improvement in the doing of arts. For instance, during the Paleolithic age the people used to do their paintings or works of art. in walls of caves that existed in their vicinity. These magnificent art works exist to date in museums and cultural heritage sites. Most of them are thousand and thousand years old, but they still portray the way of living for people in that era (Sayers, 2001:19). These paintings have helped archaeologists in writing the history of their nations as they give documented evidence. In essence, the history of art in Australia is no different from the histories of other countries as the stages it took in evolution are relatively the same to the others. Ideally, the art market in the traditional times strongly believed in oil paintings in representing landscapes of Australia. However, contemporary art over took the oil paintings within the domestic market paving way for international accreditation for artistes from Australia (Coombes, 2006:23). With the focus on landscape painting, the Australian landscape is one guided by notions of beauty, style, and decor. The landscape paintings by artists from Australia depicted their artistic tastes and preferences. In essence, paintings do not speak, but they tend to communicate. The expressions within a painting need to have a proper arrangement to depict its social relations to power. The communicative aspect and the social aspect need not separated as they will detract the meaning hidden in the painting (Short, 2005:197). Ideally, landscape painting is a highly selective process meaning that only the eleme nts that are of essence get to select to be part of the painting. However, emphasize is also on some key aspects that trend to portray the meaning of the scenery in question. Essentially, these paintings provide a relation between them and the original landscape where drawn. Remarkably, some foreign painters also managed to paint out the landscapes in Australia despite the fact