Gypsy soul tour diary - Alice Springs - dot painting

17^th September 2010

Today I’m doing my ‘Dot painting’ workshop which I’m really excited about. It’s held at Desert Park, which is a huge park designed like a desert. It also has wildlife areas and workshops about the aboriginal culture, the wildlife and things in general about the area. Stew stayed in the carpark and relaxed while I took a look around.

 

Birds at Desert Park

The dot painting workshop was very interesting. Apparently dot painting traditionally was only painted on the ground with sticks and sometimes ‘ochre’ in the dirt. So it wasn’t lasting – a bit zen! It’s only in the last 40 years that dot painting has become a trend to paint on canvas. Dot paintings are generally painted with an aerial view.

The Class

My painting

The circles usually mean ‘Waterholes’ or ‘home’ and the dots leading from the ‘Waterholes’ to another waterhole means a journey or traveling. The ‘U’ symbol means ‘people’. Dot painting is the style of painting mainly in central Australia, but when you get to the top end like Darwin the style changes to ‘X-ray’ style paintings.

Blackheath to Broome Tour - dot painting

I was pretty happy with my painting. I painted Stew and my journey of this tour. So that’s a nice little memory to have. I might turn it into a card when I get home, like the others I’ve been selling at my shows.

The gigs have slowed down for us at the moment because of the few cancellations, but they’ll pick up again when we get into NSW and our schedule gets pretty busy.

Stew's new headlight

A venue that Stew and I have spotted in Alice Springs is ‘Monte’s’. It’s a very quirky looking venue with live original music on most nights.  I’d love to play there when we come back. It has a nice vibe about it. We went to Monte’s tonight because they have about five live acts on and it’s Gypsy themed. Lots of samba and African music, drums and djembes. We danced our hearts out.

A view of Alice Springs from the top of Anzac Hill - It's surrounded by mountains