Return to Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from Australia
Known for his powerful, minimalist compositions, Paddy Bedford was almost exclusively a painter of landscapes. Rendered from an aerial perspective, his paintings portray the rugged, savanna-like landscape of the East Kimberley region of Western Australia, where he lived. Bedford's works encompass a broad diversity of locations and time periods—from events of the Dreaming to the massacres of local Aboriginal people during the colonial period to places and episodes from his own life both as a senior elder of his community and as a stockman working on Euro-Australian owned cattle stations. This painting portrays the landscape surrounding Queensland Creek, known to the Gija people as Merrmerrji. While most East Kimberley painters such as Freddie Timms, whose work is also included in the exhibition, create compositions of uniform, strictly monochromatic areas of color separated by rows of white dots, Bedford frequently blended two or more hues within a single section, producing an almost translucent quality in which his individual brushstrokes are readily discernible.
Anatjari Tjakamarra was a leading artist in the first group of painters from the Aboriginal community of Papunya in the Northern Territory whose works began the contemporary desert acrylic painting movement in the early 1970s. Sons and Orphans shows places near Kurlkurta, part of his traditional homeland, that are associated with two Dreaming narratives. The six circles connected by sinuous bands represent the primordial journey of a father and his two sons. The circular motif at the bottom center depicts Tjuntinya, the cave where the three began their travels. The looping bands on either side represent hills near the cave. The paired sinuous lines extending upward from the cave indicate the path of the two sons and the single line shows that of their father. The two circles at the left center represent Wingarntjirri, where the three stopped to collect quartz for making knives and spearheads, which appear as triangular forms between the sets of tracks. The two concentric circles at the upper left depict Iturunya, a water hole where the three camped before journeying on to Walpurtintjanya, another water hole, shown at the upper right. The two large concentric circles on the lower right represent the camping places of two orphan boys who also traveled through the area in the Dreaming. The spokelike lines surrounding the lower circle represent ranges of rocks where the orphans made their camp.
One of the most original artists from the Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) community in the Northern Territory, Mitjili Napurrula began her career by creating the dotted landscapes typical of desert acrylic painting. However, she rapidly developed a highly distinctive style based on stylized plant motifs that typically represent trees. The title of this work refers to wood objects used specifically by men and, in particular, to the creation of spears that form an integral element of men's ceremonies. Men and women in Australian Aboriginal societies lead largely separate religious lives, with members of one sex being excluded from participating in or witnessing most of the ceremonies belonging to the other. Hence, as a woman, the artist refers only obliquely to spears and other men's ceremonial wood objects by portraying not the objects themselves but the trees from which they are made, which appear as two stark rows of semiabstract vegetal designs.
The works of George Tjungurrayi, who began painting at Pupunya in the mid-1970s and has lived and worked in a number of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, share a distinctive style based on geometric motifs consisting of stark concentric lines that interact optically to create a shimmering effect. This painting shows a series of clay pans (natural clay-lined depressions in which water collects after rainfall or from the runoff of springs) surrounding a water soakage in an area called Kirrimalunya. The waters of the clay pans and soak at Kirrimalunya are said to have sustained the Tingari Men, an important group of ancestral beings, when they were traveling through the region during the Dreaming.