First Australians

Early Papunya Paintings at the Grey Art Gallery

by Ron Dowd on September 15, 2009

in Posts on Art+Psyche

Old Walter Tjampitjinpa - Rainbow and Water StoryMy friend Philip (who’s associated with the Grey Art Gallery) recently alerted me to their marvellous show of Early Papunya Paintings currently on at the Gallery: Icons of the Desert, Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya.

(Pictured on the left is Rainbow and Water Story, ca. August 1972, by Old Walter Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, ca. 1912–1981) – Synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 61 x 52 cm.)

If you click through to the show (go first to Grey Art Gallery) there’s a wonderful set of images, plus reviews and video clips. The show contains 50 works, almost all of them produced during the first years of Papunya painting. For a good review and images, try the Aboriginal Art and Culture: an American Eye site. And, for a good summary of the complex social-political issues engendered by the work and by Aboriginal Art in general, see this review by Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian:

Almost four decades after the initial creative burst at Papunya settlement, the first deep, detailed catalogue of desert boards reveals in unvarnished fashion a key, all-shaping feature of our relationship to western desert art: what we think we know about the dreamings and the sacred traditions, and the ancestral creators and the rites encoded in the boards is at best a surface gloss. Not only is the tradition full of ambiguity, not only are the accounts given of the art cryptic, mere coded hints at secret material: the explanations of the works that we have from many of the artists are often concealed behind a veil of imperfect communication. And the pattern goes wider: with such ambiguity at the wellspring of the painting movement, what outside accounts of later desert art can be taken as fixed, literal truth?

Ronnie Tjampitjinpa - Untitled
At this time when there is growing resistance from some Aboriginal elders to the depiction of secret and sacred knowledge, it seems best to me to attempt to stay close to the visual, to appreciate what traces have been made available to us from a ancient culture, as yet further evidence of the profound riches of the human psyche.

And on the left, another (more recent) work from the show.

Untitled, 2003
Ronnie Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, born 1943)
Acrylic on linen, 151 x 183 cm

Tagged as: Art, First Australians, Old Walter Tjampitjinpa, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa

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Tommy Watson at Agathon Galleries

by Ron Dowd on September 8, 2009

in Posts on Art+Psyche

Tommy Watson - Artilanja
Tommy Watson
Artilanja, 2008
Acrylic on canvas, 160 x 200 cm

I attended the opening of the new Tommy Watson exhibition at Agathon Galleries last Saturday and was stunned by the richness and uniqueness of this work – here is something new in Aboriginal Art.

It’s too early for me to say if I like it all, but I see that it’s very different, and the genuine voice of an artist who has followed his internal journeys – which are always changing, yet remain firmly rooted in traditional knowledge.

Tommy evidently says, when people ask him to paint something similar to what he’s already done, that he can’t – “I’ve been there before, I can’t go back there again”. Although he began painting only in 2001 or so, and has produced only a couple of hundred paintings, he now has an international reputation.

For him the process of painting is like a meditation. He works as if in a trance – and while he does he drops in and out of song…and when he is not painting he lives as if in another world…it’s a deeply spiritual and cultural place, with his attention and consciousness turned inwards, as if in singular contact with his ancestors…his frame of mind seems to be in the same place as would be that of his people some 1000 years ago.

At the opening, the SMH critic John McDonald spoke of watching Watson working at his studio in Alice Springs, and how as he takes the paintbrush on a journey over the canvas, one that can stop or become diverted at any time. The overall effect is of interpenetrating layers of colour and rich meanderings.

Tommy was born around 1935 and is a senior Pitjantjatjara elder and Law Man. He lived a semi-nomadic life in his youth, ranging over thousands of kilometres in some of the most extreme and unforgiving regions of Western Australia. Later he was a stockman. I was particularly struck by how this man’s hard life and rich traditional knowledge has informed his work – and also struck by the seriousness with which he takes the art making process, and his desire to transmit some of the Dreaming process (though much of it remains secret). (Quotations above are taken from the gallery notes, by John Ioannou.)

Tagged as: Art, First Australians, Tommy Watson

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Billy Benn Perrurle

by Ron Dowd on March 15, 2009

in Posts on Art+Psyche

Here’s an artist whose work I love – Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre. The Aboriginal collection at the AGNSW is currently closed for renovations so, not being able to see his energetic works there, I’ll post some here.
Billy Benn Perrurle
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Bindi, Acrylic on board, 10 x 16 cm
Billy Benn Perrurle
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Acrylic on linen
Billy Benn Perrurle
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Harts Range, pre 1997, Utopia, acrylic on fibreboard panel
(Collection of the National Gallery of Australia)

It can be hard to track down information about Aboriginal artists, but this Indigenart exhibition page has some interesting background on the man. I like this quotation from Catherine Peattie, Arts Co-odinator at Mwerre Anthurre Artists:

Residing in Alice Springs the Mwerre Anthurre Artists only occasionally get to visit their country. As a result, they paint their county from memory. Remembering and painting country becomes a bittersweet experience. It is a celebration of connection to place with each new painting reinvigorating their culture, contrasted against a sadness at their separation from such a significant space. Carrying the country within, Billy Benn says when he sees that country in his mind’s eye his spirit is there, and his spirit lifts. The paintings are imbued with such a sense of place that laws of time and space become circular as we the viewer are transported to this country.

These are works that connect with my own interest in remembered landscapes, that inevitably become, in part at least, landscapes of the imagination. Such landscapes can also be strong reminders from what is behind landscape, behind our own psychic landscapes – that other landscape of the noumenal, our essence, which I continue to write about and attempt to articulate in my own art making.

Tagged as: Art, Billy Benn Perrurle, First Australians, Landscape

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A Rebbelib

by Ron Dowd on March 5, 2009

in Posts on Art+Psyche

More from the recent Voyages of the Ancestors – Vaka Moana exhibition: here’s a rebbelib or chart-stick, a navigational teaching aid from the Marshall Islands.
chart-stick
From the caption in the gallery:

Marshall Islands sailing systems demand extensive knowledge of local currents and swells. Rebbelib are used to instruct apprentice navigators about the direction of ocean currents and the resulting swell and wave patterns as these currents encounter and then move around islands, marked by cowrie shells. Used only as teaching aids, rebbelib were not taken on to canoes.

This is an art piece in its own right – a device with hints of Duchamp’s Large Glass (with it’s “playful physics”); or like a Rover Thomas work, depicting land form, in this case relating to sea but no less instructive of country.

Tagged as: Art, First Australians, Pacific

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Back on the Griffin land axis

January 19, 2009 Posts on Art+Psyche

We Australians are often disparaging about Canberra – the large federal buildings “like white tombstones in the sun”, someone recently suggested to me. But I like visiting there, and whenever we go to the NSW South Coast we always take the inland route – as we did on our recent Christmas trip. Canberra bakes silently [...]

Tagged as: Art, First Australians, Place

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Goraymurrai in Sydney

November 26, 2008 Posts on Art+Psyche

We’ve been having wet weather and odd winds for the last few days, as we move through one of our local seasons towards the January heat. I say “one of” because having lived in Sydney for more than 20 years I don’t have an experience of four seasons – despite continuing attachments here to the [...]

Tagged as: First Australians

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Thinking of Mulrunji Doomadgee

November 11, 2008 Posts on Art+Psyche

I’m reflecting on the freedom I have to make art in my life (in the widest sense of the idea of art making) – and thinking of Mulrunji Doomadgee, who died within forty minutes of being put in the Palm Island lock-up, for a misdemeanor, in 2004. The sorry sentencing of Lex Wotton (charged with [...]

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More Arrernte ceremony

October 26, 2008 Posts on Art+Psyche

More stills of Arrernte men preparing for a ceremony (from Episode 4 of the current First Australians series on SBS televsion). First Australians makes the point that even though the men at the Hermannsburg Aboriginal Mission were able to accommodate aspects of Christian ritual by day, by night indigenous views of community and ceremony continued [...]

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No more of these "settlement" lies..

October 22, 2008 Posts on Art+Psyche

I’m watching the brilliant First Australians series at the moment on SBS television and last night in Episode 4 was struck by the intelligence and artistic sophistication of the Arrernte people in their nightly ceremonies which they have conducted for many thousands of years, and continued to conduct in the face of dogged manipulation and [...]

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Emily Pwerle’s “overrunning”

June 17, 2008 Posts on Art+Psyche

Emily Pwerle paints Awleye Atnwengerrp (women’s ceremony) dreaming at Utopia, Northern Territory. (See this article on her.) Here’s a lovely work of hers, and I’m struck by the connection with it and Merleau-Ponty’s “the whole landscape is overrun with words” (see previous post). Emily Pwerle – Awelye (UGEP4552) (around 1930 – ) Acrylic on linen, [...]

Tagged as: Art, Emily Pwerle, First Australians

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