Oenpelli school

 Oenpelli in a centre of bark painting in the west of Arnhem Land. It used to be an Anglican mission and the missionaries bought pictures from native artists and sold them in the cities on the coast. There was a problem how to pay for the pictures, it was decided it depended on time spent painting each picture. I guess the amount of little strokes in each picture has something to do with this decision. The paintings seem similar to those from the eastern part of Arnhem Land, which also have plenty of little strokes, but there is one difference: in Oenpelli the figures are full of strokes, whereas the background is of one colour, whereas in the East the background is full of strokes, while the figures are left in one colour.

The natives of Arnhem Land are considered artists because in Europe cubism and similar currants became popular. Even Picasso, seeing one of the bark pictre from Oenpelli, said that he would like to paint like this. If Picasso himself sais that, they must be artists.

If anyone wants to lean more on the subject, I published a book about it: