Songlines Aboriginal Art: Papunya Paintings, Page 13 ~ aboriginal-art.com



Please be Patient, Image Loading: Australian Aboriginal painting from Kintore by Willy Tjungurrayi at Songlines Aboriginal Art

 

 

TDP 4. Travels of the Tingari, Willy Tjungurrayi, 1994, 24" x 36" For Sale

Willy Tjungurrayi has often been described as one of the great colorists of the painting movement for his effective evocations of desert's powerful light and dramatic landscape.

The story associated with this work belongs to the Tingari cycle. The Tingari are a group of mythical ancestors of the Dreaming who traveled over vast stretches of the country, performing rituals, creating and shaping particular sites. Their travels and adventures are enshrined in a number of song cycles. In this painting the concentric circles represent waterhole sites, and the background patterns indicate sandhills and rock formations.

On one level, classic "Tingari Cycle" style paintings such as this one can be seen as abstract maps of country, teaching aids used in initiation which depict ancestral journeys through the vast Western Desert landscape. In these paintings, a grid of "traveling lines" connects the rows of concentric circles, which, like the targets that they resemble, denote the destinations of the Tingari ancestors (water sources, campsites, hunting grounds, sacred sites, ceremonial grounds etc.). The tension between this grid which the eye is conditioned to see as symmetrical, and the asymmetrical placement of the circles, which appear to be pulling in any number of opposing directions, activates the best of these paintings with a dynamic energy which echoes the restless journeying of the Tingari ancestors themselves.

The network of "traveling lines," representing the journeys of the Tingari men, which generally followed chains of soakages through the arid desert landscape, link up the concentric circles or destinations, and appear to harness the vast desert landscape like a net, implying that for the Pintupi the landscape is defined by both human and spiritual relationships to it. The Pintupi believe the travels of the Tingari ancestors created the physical features of the landscape, its rock formations, sand ridges, waterholes, and eroded creek beds, travels which were until recent times echoed by the Pintupi's own nomadic patterns of movement through their traditional country which often encompassed an area as large as 3,000 square miles during a given year.