Hi, my name is Renato A.Pirotta.

I signed up on 1999-07-12 00:41 The aim of this page is to find an Aboriginal artist. The tools are digital images of five paintings he created, attached to this file. More then one year of search and the question remains what is his name! Jun and I traveled from the 23rd of January 2000 for 12 days spider net like, starting from Charters Tower, 3580 km by car on an extended fact finding mission. We have now gathered more information on the image interpretation of the five paintings but not on the artist or the tribe he belongs too. Art lovers provided us with many hints based on that our hope to find his name and get more information about his creation is still alive. We greatly appreciate if you as a reader of this information could kindly send us comments or advises by e-mail, or further more introduce our search purpose to a person who may know him or the style of his creation. No deadline is set to find the name of this genuine artist. Walk about - the storyline On our 13th trip to North Queensland, looking for the entrance to a historical museum, Jun and I accidentally entered the "Relic Shop" of hippie like Greg and Margaret Franz in the Australian outback town of Charters Towers. It was registered as 9th of February 1999. A superb place for finding the right thing. This shop, a kind of historical warehouse next to the city museum, is huge in dimensions and filled up to the roof with the leftovers and nostalgia of ghost houses of surrounding gold mining towns. Furniture, collectibles, windows, doors, and many other things never seen before are stocked in this amazing place. Looking for nothing special, I got several splendid ideas for new theme restaurants and beautiful lofts, and I'm sure it's a place where theme park designers and interior freaks could spend days dreaming around. As Greg told me, in early March 2000, they move the "Relic Shop" to a former church bought at an auction and located in the same small city. A perfect home for a business dealing in historical curiosities. Image photo illustrating new location showing Greg, daughter Bonita, and me. Between mountains of old things we found a nice little painting on 19mm wood board and bought it. At the Cattlemen's Rest Motor Inn where we stayed that night in 1999, I cleaned it carefully from dust and hanged it on the wall. By next morning through the earthbound colors, the painting was sending a kind of a message and we back to the Relic Shop. According to Greg, he exchanged five paintings for food and lodging, they were here and there in the shop. After a through search by Jun, she found all paintings, we could not stop and had to acquire them for our art collection back home. The by name unknown artist of Aboriginal roots on his journey to somewhere, "walk about" in dreamtime as locals use to say, was or is in his fifties according to Greg. He stayed in Charters Tower for several months in 1998, spoke only broken English, painted for daily survival before continuing his walk to unknown destinations. We like to know where he is or was, and his name. The not completely understandable images are created on 19mm thick wood board, an unusual material for Aboriginal paintings of the last ten years. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians used pictorial methods of recording important information. They did not have a written language in the sense that they did not have an alphabet. However they did use art as a form of communication or language which they expressed in a number of different forms such as rock carvings, cave paintings and designs (symbols) cut into trees, wooden articles such as boomerangs and on their bodies (scarification). Ancient images were recorded on rocks, on sand for special ceremonies or barks of selected tropical trees. In tourism circles well known are the cave paintings of Laura, we visited the cave in 1989 and came back with many exiting photos of the ancient murals. Recently, with the growing tourism boom the artisans started to paint on canvas. Finding something like we encountered is exceptional. A basic name search started 1999 by e-mail and letters, addressing Aboriginal institutions, galleries, and museums. The second "spider net" fieldwork from 22nd of January to 3rd of February 2000 was done around the area of Charters Tower. A third search by e-mail was extended to media and the Australian cyber networks. The fourth search took us in January 2002 to Perth and its region. With the help of others, we will concentrate to find the artist by further intensive research and hope to be able to tell more about the beauty of these images in a few month. Many thanks to all the kind people we met on our trips, and to those who read the letter and participate in the ongoing search. Comments we think are very useful for further investigations: 17th of February 2000, e-mail from Shirley Hollingsworth for Jim Russell: About the art that you sent us, many Aboriginal artists like to remain anonymous and do not sign their work. Because of this, it is almost impossible to find the Artist unless you are talking to people who know them personally. The art that you sent though seems to be similar to the Central Australian Aboriginal style of work with perhaps a bit of the Arnhem Land style. To find out more about the Art/Artist you really need to speak to people who might know the Artist personally or possibly the traditional Tribal region/group. Contact address: Click here to send me an e-mail references not available research paper not available Japanese text available In this "Dark Age" of computer crashes and notebook dinners, with unlimited universal communication possibility through the www, I'm still trying to create artistic images from inside my burnout ice-coffee belly using highly sophisticated software I barely understand, so please come back after some weeks.

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