PADDY TJAMATJI (JAMPIN)

Painted at Warmun, Turkey Creek 1987
Private collection, acquired directly from the artist

The painting appears in particuarly good condition for a work by the artist of this period, with very little pigment loss, and all pigments appearing to be generally stable. There is much water spotting within the image possibly from the painting being rained upon during its creation. There is a fine crack approximately 25 cm long in one layer of the plywood near the upper right hand corner. The painting has recently been rehoused in a a minimalist dark brown wooden frame.
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Cf. For a painting by the artist that refers to the presence of Europeans in the Kimberley in a similar composition, see Wulangkuya, hills visible from Turkey Creek, 1984, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, in Caruana, W. (ed), Windows on the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National Gallery, Australian National Gallery and Ellsyd Press, Canberra and Sydney, 1989, p.174, plate 102, illus; see also Djuwarlin - Mount House Station Gap and aerodrome, n.d., in the Holmes à Court Collection, in Akerman, K., "I bin paintin' first." Paddy Jaminji - trail-blazing artist of the Warmun school of Aboriginal art, Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 2004, illus; The Rainbow Snake, Galiru, 1983, in the collection of the Berndt Museum, in Stanton, J. E., Painting the Country: Contemporary Aboriginal art from the Kimberley region, Western Australia, The University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1989, p.37, plate 33, illus

One of the artist's last paintings before he succumbed to trachoma, Tjamatji was particularly concerned about matters of cultural maintenance among the Gija people. His role as painter of the boards carried in the first Gurirr Gurirr ceremonies from the late 1970s onwards led him to initiate the east Kimberley school of painting at Warmun (Turkey Creek), where he insisted on using traditional pigments and binders to emphasise the cultural integrity of the paintings. He eventually painted subjects other than those relating to the ritual including several that place evidence of European presence within the context of the Kimberley landscape and Gija law. As in Wulangkuya, hills visible from Turkey Creek, 1984 (see above), the horizontal across the lower section of the painting represents a bitumen road