Bradshaw Paintings - Gwion Gwion (Guion Guion) Art
Ancient Rock Art of North West Kimberley, Australia

	The Bradshaw Paintings are incredibly sophisticated, as you will see from the 32 pictures in the Paintings Section, yet they are not recent creations but originate from an unknown past period which some suggest could have been 50,000 years ago. This art form was first recorded by Joseph Bradshaw in 1891, when he was lost on an Kimberley expedition in the north west of Australia. Dr. Andreas Lommel stated on his expedition to the Kimberleys in 1955 that the rock art he referred to as the Bradshaw Paintings may well predate the present Australian Aborigines.

The Mystery of the Bradshaw Paintings of Australia

According to legend, they were made by birds. It was said that these birds pecked the rocks until their beaks bled, and then created these fine paintings by using a tail feather and their own blood. This art is of such antiquity that no pigment remains on the rock surface, it is impossible to use carbon dating technology. The composition of the original paints cant be determined, and whatever pigments were used have been locked into the rock itself as shades of Mulberry red, and have become impervious to the elements.

Fortuitously, in 1996 Grahame Walsh discovered a Bradshaw Painting partly covered by a fossilised Mud Wasp nest, which scientists have removed and analysed using a new technique of dating, determining it to be 17,000 + years old.

In 1938, the British explorer Sir George Grey described the Australian Kimberley as the "roughest that he had ever seen". Over the last sixteen years Grahame Walsh has explored this part of Australia, and its harsh inhospitable environment mainly on foot, and has discovered thousands of these magnificent Bradshaw Paintings. This Bradshaw Art site presents a summary of the data Grahame Walsh has collected.

These paintings by the Bradshaw artists show an astonishing sophistication. In my humble opinion as a fellow artist, they compare to anything that has been created in the past. I think that their discovery ranks in importance with that of Chauvet, Lascaux and Nefertari's Tomb.

The renowned art historian Ruskin summed up the importance of art in the following words: "Great Nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

	As Kenneth Clark pointed out in his book 'Civilisation', every now and then something remarkable happens in the arts. For example, the cave paintings of France, the Cycladic sculptures of the Aegean, the Olmec sculptures of Central America, the Renaissance of Italy, the Impressionists, and so on. I believe the Bradshaw Paintings were another remarkable happening. The Bradshaw artists' complete mastery of the available technique equates them with the creators of the above masterpieces. For me the Bradshaw 'Dancers' (left), are as great as the 'Dancers' by Matisse. They share all the grace, vigor and joy of life, the very essence of Mankind, that he captured in that great painting. The following quote from Matisse Speaks has an important bearing on the Bradshaws:

"The significance of a work of art varies according to the period in which you are looking at it. Should we confine ourselves to our own time and consider the work with today's fresh new sensibility, or should we study the period during which it was created, place it back in its own time and see it with the eyes of the people of those days, so as to understand what the work signified when it was conceived and what it meant to its contemporaries?"