Songlines Aboriginal Art: Papunya Paintings, Page 16 ~ aboriginal-art.com



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

 

CAP 1 . Tingari at Tilpulnga, Anatjari Tjampitjinpa, 1988, 48" x 66"

This painting was exhibited at the John Webber Gallery's groundbreaking 1988 New York exhibition, Papunya Tula, curated in collaboration with Gabriella Pizzi. John Webber was one of New York's foremost dealers in minimal art, the early champion of artists such as Sol LeWitt. The canvas is a striking example of the variety of expression Pintupi painters brought to their classic" Tingari Cycle" works of the period with its enormous roundels dominating the composition, lending it a sense of surprise like Magritte's behemoth Granny Smith apple bursting out of a bourgeois sitting room.

The work ,depicts designs associated with secret-sacred Tingari ceremonies, which concern ritual guardianship of the land, its power and secrets. Paintings often focus on a site specific to the artist, which was visited and created in the ancestral past by Tingari spirit beings and is therefore infused with their sacred power. This story concerns mythological events enacted by the Tingari Men at Tipulnga, a hill-site with rockhole water. The roundels indicate these rockhole cisterns, large catchments of water in deep gorges.

Until quite recently, the location of water has dominated the lives of Aboriginal people. The traditional Aboriginal pattern of movement in the desert was largely from one water source to the next, at various times meeting in larger groups. Chains of waterholes or "soaks" follow the great Dreaming Tracks, and Aboriginal painted iconography often is on one level, a record their physical whereabouts. They occur in sequences of locations memorized as part of sacred ceremonial song cycles, recording the ancient journeys of a group's ancestors. These sites are visited in the present time by "custodians" who care for each as sacred sites.

Bruce Chatwin in his book Songlines , made an analogy comparing the Dreaming Tracks depicted in Tingari Cycle paintings to a musical score connecting up all of Australia for Aboriginal people. If one were to apply the analogy here, this painting alluding to rockhole water, running cool and deep, is reminiscent of powerful sustaining bass notes, pedal points whose subterranean harmonics reverberate with a deep resonance.