By Annabel Kjar, secondary Visual Arts teacher
Drawing can communicate what words alone cannot express. Drawings are aids to memory, they record language, our versions of history and places, as well as our beliefs and myths, and our imaginings. Will this new technology deem the innovations from our ancestors irrelevant?
In their first unit for Visual Arts, the students in grade 6 have gone ‘back to basics’ by discovering how the first images were made and how artists used and still use drawing to communicate their ideas. Ancient drawings made by mixing animal fats or saliva with bones and natural pigments can be found all over the world. It is highly likely that most of the colours used in the artwork found in caves and on the remains of the deceased (tattoos, body paint) were made from rocks. These pigments are made by crushing and grinding the rocks to a fine powder.
In this week’s lessons, the grade 6's learned from this ancient tradition, by mixing and grinding the ochres gathered from Red Ochre Beach in Tasmania, Australia to make paint. They used these ochres, chalks, and vine charcoal, made from the burned vines to draw.
Ochres from Tasmania, Australia
The Australian Aboriginal people, whose drawing and painting traditions go back about 40,000 years were not the first to use ochre, In Africa people were using ochre tens of thousands of years before those in Europe. At the Blombos Cave the first painting kit was found- of abalone shells used as a palette bowl, with red and yellow ochre, as well a stone tools used to grind the piments and bone spatulas.
Tools for communication
Grade 6 used the same simple tools and their own hands as stencils like in prehistoric times, to leave our mark to say- we were here. And despite AI’s cleverness, it is this real and physical opportunity to think through and within a material that AI can never replace and one in which dreams could become real.