Anatjari (Yanyatjarri) Tjakamarra

The original Papunya Tula Artists documentation reads, "The artist has shown the site of Tjilingaanya near Lake McDonald far to the west of Alice Springs. Two Python Ancestors stopped at this site during their travels east. Their mythological camp is now marked by a large depression where the snakes are said to have slept. The central section of the painting depicts this area with the roundels being rockholes and the sinuous lines the waterways. The artist has shown the footprints of a women who was travelling in the area also ceremonial head-dress worn by women and a woman's fighting club. The irregular shapes on either side of the painting are sandhills while the roundels are waterholes."

Yanyatjarri (Anatjari) Tjakamarra was one of the last arrivals to Papunya (1966) from living a hunting and gathering life in the bush and began painting with the Papunya Tula Artists only five years after, as a young middle-aged man. Tjakamarra was a precise and thoughtful man, both in his everyday life and as a painter, and his early paintings were all very carefully executed and delineated. As written elsewhere (Myers 1999, 2002), Tjakamarra’s early paintings in the 1970s can be seen as virtuoso acts of experimentation with simple forms; their arrangement is evidence of a trajectory of almost systematic innovation. By the mid-1970s, Tjakamarra’s work was beginning to be recognized and he was among the leading artists who were given larger canvases to paint by the managers of Papunya Tula. There are significant continuities in themes in his work, viewed over time, and the painting here - acquired and held by James Wolfensohn for over two decades - is a striking example of some of Yanyatjarri’s most exemplary work. 

One can trace the themes of this work from 1982, identified with the place Tjilingaanya, documented as Two Pythons (Kuniya Kutjarra) Tjukurrpa and “a woman” (also Tjukurrpa) with other paintings, large and small, but it most particularly extends some other large works that have been documented and the comparison with those works allows for a more detailed understanding of this painting as well as its evolution. With the help of documentation of a large painting from 1975 and another from 1988 (in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, purchased from one of the first shows at John Weber Gallery in 1989), one can recognize that there are two sets of “human” footprints, said to be “a woman”, on either side of a central composition. There are, here, two different “women” ancestors (not to be confused with the Two Women Dreaming stories), two distinct storylines. From the earlier and later paintings (see Myers and Skerritt, Irritja Kuwarri Tjungu: Past and Present Together. Fifty Years of Papunya Tula Artists, Charlottesville, 2021, p. 179 for the 1988 painting in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection), one can conclude that these are two different, distinct Tjukurrpa (or ancestral) women, and their identity as women is further marked by the depiction of a mawulyarri, a necklace worn by women made of possum tails strung on hairstring. These are not “headdresses,” as the documentation wrongly suggests, and Tjakamarra has used the mawulyarri in both of the other paintings with women’s footprints surrounding a central composition. In the 1982 painting, one might suggest that one of the women’s footprints is the often-depicted ancestral Snake Woman, Kutungu, who journeys eastward across Pintupi country to Muruntji. Presumably, she crossed the path of the Two Pythons. The other ancestral woman, as documented in the earlier and later paintings, was travelling westward from the Docker River area, and she is depicted with the mawulyarri and the kuturu (digging stick, or fighting club).

The central composition, documented as the Two Python ancestors and identified with the sinuous waterways left behind by their movements, is very clearly and precisely painted. The use of the yellow for two sets of sinuous lines is not discussed in the documentation, but Tjakamarra several times has used yellow paint to indicate the ancestral being, also a snake, the poisonous (or “cheeky”) death adder (Nyuna), who he described as leading the Two Python ancestors on these travels. These ancestral beings are described as closely associated with the landscape features of Tjilingaanya, west of Lake Macdonald.

While drawing on the general structure of the women ancestors bounding the central figures, in this painting, the central composition really bursts into view with a striking depiction of their presence in the landscape. It is not only the focus of the painting by virtue of its placement, but Tjakamarra has chosen to use the boldest colors of his palette to bring this story and place into view.

Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University, 2022

See Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2002, pp. 102-105, for field notes and discussion of a closely related painting by the artist depicting the same subject matter entitled Big Map of Country.