Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, in 1996 (catalogue number MN960708)

Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1996

Djamu Gallery, Australian Museum at Customs House, Sydney, Mapping our countries, October 9, 1999 - February 27, 2000

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri was one of the original group of painters at Papunya in 1971. A respected innovator, his work influenced several of the artists working in the Men’s Painting Room. A leading figure in the movement for nearly three decades, in the last years of his life Namarari embarked on a series of paintings that focused on one of the main sites of significance to him, Tjunginpa, the setting for the actions of a major ancestral being, the eponymous Small or Marsupial Mouse and the associated Tjukurrpa (Dreamings). The paintings are a departure from the rectilinear compositions developed in previous years for which he became renowned. Although he had experimented with all-over dotting in earlier paintings,¹ Namarari’s canvases were now flooded in fields of dotting, edge to edge to create a sublime and atmospheric surface.

The interpretive gloss of these paintings attributes the inspiration for the dotting to the tracks of the ancestral Mouse, while the larger spots represent the edible berries of kampurarrpa, a type of bush raisin that thrives after rain. The paintings, however, possess a numinous quality that far outweighs any attendant narrative. Stripped of any extraneous imagery, the paintings radiate an inner light created by subtle shifts in the density and scale of the artist’s marks. These are contemplative works that bring to mind JMW Turner’s late atmospheric, quasi-abstract stormy seascapes and landscapes bathed in the light of setting suns: free of the physical world, these paintings appear to intimate a concern with the afterlife.²

¹ See for example, Wallaby Dreaming, 1982, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, in Lüthi, B. (ed.), Aratjara, Art of the First Australians: Traditional and contemporary works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, DuMont, Cologne, 1993, p.261,Plate 107; and in O’Halloran, Alec B., Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri: The master from Marnpi, LifeDesign Australia, Sydney, 2018, p.179, plate PS9.2.

² For a similar work in the series of Tjunginpa paintings, made some five months later, see Tjunginpa (Mouse) Dreaming, 1996, Promised Gift of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan to the Seattle Art Museum, in O’Halloran 2018:201, plate PS17.4.