Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula

Johnny Warangula painted Water Dreaming at Kalipinya in the winter of 1972. Papunya had received eleven inches of rain in March, and soil moisture persisted resulting in an excellent season for plants and animals. The deluge bolstered Warangula, an acknowledged ‘rainmaker’. The exuberant paintings he produced in the months after the downpour, evoke conditions he visualised far to the west at Kalipinypa, a key Water Dreaming site where his ancestors had lived for innumerable generations.[1]

Warangula’s paintings of this period have a special significance in the history of Western Desert art, as they mark the moment when the painterly potential of the new media was first grasped.[2] Warangula drew inspiration from several interrelated sources — Kalipinypa, a deep well, dug into a small stony plain far to the west of Alice Springs — tulku (sacred objects) that embody the essence of the storm at Kalipinypa — Winpa the lightening ancestor who clapped his boomerangs, stamped the ground and sang the elements of a mythic storm into existence — the force of a flood that swept all before it — a subsequent explosion of plants and amphibians that issued from the land after the floodwaters subsided — the appearance of Kalawa (the egret ancestor) who alighted at Kalipinypa to feast on frogs and insects that abounded after the flood.

Warangula’s genius was to embody Winpa when he painted, and thus empowered, he summoned interrelated elements - lightening, thunder, storm clouds, cascading rain and rainbows, into a single picture plain, harnessing the concatenation of meteorological phenomena, land and ceremony. Each of painting he created during this period was unique, each an improvisation that recombined the ephemeral elements associated with Kalipinypa into a poetic invocation of the storm and its easterly passage. In a few short months, Warangula produced a torrent of imagery that was wild and uncontrollable - like the storm itself. Rather than recapitulating customary icons, Warangula shattered the signs for lightening and running water to create a permeable, prismatic space comprised of dots, sinuous lines and staccato bars which jostle and surge within a vibrant pictorial ecology.[3]

The current painting, Water Dreaming at Kalipinya has several distinguishing features that demand attention. The composition is built around a centrally located set of concentric circles that signify the well at Kalipinypa. That site is surrounded by a detailed depiction of five tulku, each of which bears distinctive patterns that embody various elements of the storm. Interestingly, one of these objects bears geometric designs typical of the Western Desert, while the other designs are more characteristic of Central Australia. This convergence of styles was first noted by T.G.H. Strehlow, which he observed incised into the surface of a spear thrower depicting Kalipinypa, purchased from Warangula’s father Ngalpilala Purukulu in 1933.[4] Water Dreaming at Kalipinya also includes the classic Water Dreaming motif - two roundels joined by three sinuous (dark brown) lines. This icon has been employed by other celebrated rainmaker/artists, who paint their own sites along the vast Water Dreaming songline that can be followed from Kalipinypa east, to the longitude of Papunya before heading north through the Tanami Desert and into the tropical Kimberley. Finally, the footprints of Kalawa (white reversed arrows) can be traced at the bottom of the painting, as the egret searches for frogs and insects.

Water Dreaming at Kalipinya (1972) is equivalent in its mastery to Warangula’s greatest works of the period, including A Bush Tucker Story, (1972, National Gallery of Victoria), Water Dreaming at Kalipinya (1972, John and Barbara Wilkerson Collection, New York), Egret Dreaming (1972, National Gallery of Australia) and Water Dreaming (1972 Art Gallery of Western Australia). The work emanates extraordinary electrical energy, that of Winpa the lightening ancestor, and that which is produced by Winpa’s avatar Johnny Warangula - as he grasps the excitement of painting.

1 John Kean, 'Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula: history, landscape and La Niña 1974' in Indigenous Archives: the Making and unmaking of Aboriginal Art, Perth: UWA Publishing, 2017, pp. 113-166.

2 John Kean, ‘Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula: painting in a changing landscape,’ in Art Bulletin of Victoria, 2001, pp. 47-54.

3 John Kean, Dot, Circle and Frame: how Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura, Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangula created Papunya Tula art, Doctoral Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2020, p. 177-196.

4 Theodor George Henry Strehlow, ‘The Art of circle, line and square’, in Australian Aboriginal Art, Sydney: Ure Smith, 1964, p. 57.