Songlines Aboriginal Art: Papunya Paintings, Page 5 ~ aboriginal-art.com
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TVP
8. Big Tingari Song Cycle, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, 60" x
48" (152 x122 Cms), Kintore, 1989
Yala
Yala Gibbs, who
passed away in 1999, was one of the original painting men who founded
the desert painting movement at Papunya in 1971. His work was always
moving and powerful. In his seminal book, Papunya Tula, Art of
the Western Desert, Geoffrey Bardon described the painter like
this: "Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi was easily the biggest of
the painting men, and he communicated mostly with his hands. His poignant
muteness and his size made him conspicuous and disturbing to many
people." This painting reflects the man's character — restless
and energetic. Yala Yala was one of the outstanding Pintupi painters
of the founding generation. 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.
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