Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula circa 1932-2001

Painted at Papunya in 1972
Sotheby’s, Fine Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 28 November 1995, Lot 633, illustrated on the front and back covers
Private Collection, New York

Cf. Geoffrey Bardon & James Bardon Papunya: A Place Made After the Story, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne 2004, Pp.156-169, for extensive discussion and several illustrations of other Water Dreamings by the artist painted in 1971-72; for another major work from the series, painted in the same year, see Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa in the Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson, in Benjamin, R and A.C. Weislogel (eds), Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York, 2009, page 126, catalogue number 27.

This painting is sold with accompanying documentation prepared by Geoffrey Bardon in which he describes the subject matter as ‘Big Cave and Water Dreaming’. He writes that, ‘this design is interesting for the elaborate pattern indicating the cave. It dominates the painting and obscures the Dreaming journey design and water holes. It is an unusually formal design for this artist. His style is evolving in this work and shows intense hatching that gives his paintings great force and quality. Johnny Warangkula was preoccupied with the Water Dreaming and Bush Tucker.’

In a series of extraordinary paintings made in 1971 and 1972, Warangkula sought to express the richness and fecundity of one of his major ancestrally inherited sites, Kalipinypa, which lies some 200 miles west of Alice Springs. Kalipinypa is a Water Dreaming place where native food plants such as the wild raisin kampurrarpa grow profusely after seasonal rains. In these aintings of Kalipinypa, Warangkula sought to capture the drama of the storms, the drenching rains, hail, lightning and thunder. As Geoffrey Bardon writes in his documentation of this painting, the conventional matrix of roundels marking sites that are joined by travel lines is practically obscured by the form of a cave. Within the cave a large rockhole is depicted, overflowing with torrents of water rendered as a mosaic of parallel dashes and dotted sections.