Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri 1926-1998

Bears various inscriptions on the reverse, including Stuart Art Centre catalogue no. 19341

Painted at Papunya in 1972
Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired while visiting the community of Papunya in late 1973

Cf Stylistically related paintings by the artist from the period include Bush Tucker Story, 1972, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, and Water Dreaming, 1972, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, both illustrated in Ryan, J, J. Kean et al, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011, pages 167 and 175 respectively. The former is also illustrated in Perkins, H. and H. Fink (eds), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales in association with Papunya Tula Artists, 2000, page 38. See also Yam Travelling in the Sandhills (Version 2), 1971, 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 95, catalogue number 11.

Namarari was one of the founding members of the Papunya Tula Artists group who initiated the revolution in Aboriginal desert art in the early 1970s. This work was painted towards the end of the first year of the movement in which artists adopted European materials to paint traditional ceremonial designs on portable timber boards for sale outside the community of Papunya, some 200 miles west of Alice Springs. Artists used the same graphic lexicon of symbols and designs that are found in the great but ephemeral mosaic ceremonial ground paintings and that decorate the bodies of ritual participants, and translated these in permanent materials. Typical of the desert painting tradition, and particularly of artists such as Namarari belonging to the Pintupi group, Untitled, 1972, is painted in a non-figurative style although iconographically it relates to the landscape and to body markings. The multivalent nature of desert designs associate the image with Rain and Bush Food Dreamings or ancestral narratives that celebrate the flooding of the land with seasonal rains, and the fertility in natural flora and fauna species that ensues, guaranteeing survival for the human inhabitants of the land. The series of parallel arcs in the painting may further refer to ceremonial body markings.

While many of the early paintings at Papunya feature the use of the traditional palette of red, yellow, black and white, the use of the colour pink–equivalent to a mixture of red ochre and white clay–was favoured by a number of artists, Namarari in particular.

WC