ABSTRACT
Reading and writing surely involve the exercise of both eye and mind, and the same must be true of walking. Yolngu people would inhabit their paintings much as the monastic practitioners of medieval Europe would inhabit the scriptures, walking in their minds the original, creative walk of the ancestors and, in so doing, bringing it forward into the present so as to give sense and direction to their own lives. There is a remarkable parallel between the ways in which the Dreaming is rendered manifest to Yolngu initiates through paintings, stories and experiences of living creatures, and the ways in which the hand of God was similarly revealed to the readers of medieval bestiaries. To discover what Wassily Kandinsky meant by painting, the chapter provides an example of an imaginary exhibition. There are six essentials of painting, namely spirit, resonance, thoughts, motif, brush and ink.
