ALMOST a year ago, after long reflection, Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, the most austere and dramatic stylist among the Western Desert’s senior female painters, began to shift her palette.
Tjunkiya Napaltjarri with some of her work on show at the Utopia Art gallery in Sydney. Picture: Simon Bullard
In place of her trademark molten golds and black, deep-scored lines shimmering like scars cut into space, she started experimenting with a set of softer, easier, more complementary shades. In short order she made herself, at the age of 80, into a colourist, a new kind of painter, seeking after new effects.
The fruits of this transformation are on view in her new solo exhibition at Sydney’s Utopia Art gallery: the display makes a potent case for her supremacy among the much-collected Pintupi masters of the desert.
All through her painting career Napaltjarri has been seen as a difficult artist, a creator of visual confrontations, whose works contain an air of instability and even of implicit threat. They have a taut, urgent energy about them, while the paintings of the better known, more treasured old women from the desert school are gentler in their impact, and seem almost to soothe and lull the heart with their colour harmonies and their sweeps of curve and line.
In group shows, which have long been the standard vehicle for showing new work from the Papunya Tula art stable (there is one at Melbourne’s Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi), Napaltjarri’s pieces are seen to limited effect. But in a solo hang, their relentless logic and their elusive grace come to the fore, and demand a serious attempt at interpretation.
The flyer prepared by Utopia Art contains a brief interview with Napaltjarri, in which she discusses her motives for painting, her change in style and the influence of some of the other senior women artists around her, above all that of her sister Wintjiya, with whom, for many years, she shared a husband.
"When I paint," Napaltjarri says, "I feel happy, I don’t feel sick, I don’t feel any pain. I feel strong and healthy, like I’m a young girl again." She explains how her constant landscape subject, the potent site of Yumari, just outside the desert settlement of Kiwirrkurra, acts as an intensifier of memory for her, and brings back all she has lost: her parents, the old world that breathes still in her canvases, her life in the open desert, where she spent her tranquil youth: "I’m thinking about Yumari, Tjukurrpa – the dreaming – when I’m painting – it’s my mother’s country. My mother and my father, I’ve lost them. As I paint they are always in my mind."
These remarks are revealing in their tone of deep nostalgia and in what they conceal: the dynamic method in her art, the individual angle, the personal worldview that stands out so plainly in the paint.
Can biographic detail help? The bones of Napaltjarri’s story make up a familiar desert tale. She was born, circa 1928, in remote desert at Rapalangya, north of where Kintore community, the little capital of the Pintupi, stands. She was the second wife of Toba Tjakamarra, and raised his son, the artist Turkey Tolson, one of the great pioneers of the Papunya Tula tradition.
Of her own 10 children, all born after she had "come in" from the bush with her extended family to the Haast’s Bluff settlement in 1956, only three survived to adulthood: one of them is the equally famous artist Mitjili Napurrula, the brightest star of the Haasts Bluff Art Centre.
Napaltjarri painted early in the course of the desert movement, but only reached prominence after a successful operation removed the cataracts in her eyes. She participated in the mid-1990s group workshops that brought the female Pintupi artists to public attention, but quickly after that inaugural moment went her own way.
There have been three solo and many group shows: her art has evolved, in a certain sense of the word, but as the evolution from one resolved, coherent, masterful statement to the next. One can trace, even in the early canvases, a pulse, a jagged quality: it is an art quite distinct from the mirage-like shimmers, so redolent of low mesas or dunefield landscape that art-lovers who follow the female artists of the desert know.
Perhaps Napaltjarri is close in tone to two keenly collected Pintupi women: Nurapayai Nampitjinpa, known as Mrs Bennett, and Naata Nungurrayi, both of whom now paint for private dealers.
But there are also parallels between her work and that of the earliest desert painters: old men, with whom she shares a fierce, geometric sense of pattern, and a tendency to set twin forms clashing against each other until they seem to fight for space. Intriguingly, Yumari, the constant subject of her art over the past five years, is not only a vital site for female ceremonies: it is a men’s site as well, and the distinct gender systems of the desert, which always imply each other’s presence, lie particularly intertwined there.
Gallerist Chris Hodges of Utopia Art, who has been a persistent admirer of Napaltjarri’s work, believes that the new show, which brings together almost the totality of her recent output, allows viewers for the first time to see the depth and scale of the artist’s vision.
"Here," he says, "you get to see at last on a contemporary scale what she’s really doing: you can see a body of work, and that sets the stamp on her authority. Her iconography holds up in large and small works: as abstract images, her pieces have an intensity that speaks out, and their power remains even if you know nothing about her culture. Tjunkiya’s an artist who advances, who’s always pushing on: she’s stuck to her guns, and this startling new work has come out: new colours, constant progress: the most recent work points down completely new avenues."
There are paintings of line and grid patterns; paintings that combine arcs and whorls with black, pool-like spaces; works with variegated backgrounds of gold and paler creams, and works that experiment with mauve and purple accents set on ochre colour fields. Above all, there are large, fully realised canvases, elaborate creations that seem like summaries of Napaltjarri’s desert life.
These works, all untitled, can be read simply, conservatively, as Napaltjarri, or dreaming landscapes: versions of the site at Yumari, where a "wrong-way" liaison between a man and his mother-in-law unfolded in creation times. This energy of sacrilege seems to throb from the paint. They are also evocations of the look and spirit of Yumari, an exceptionally lovely stretch of arid landscape, surrounded by the curving frame of sandhills that so often make up the boundaries of Napaltjarri’s works.
But they also have a human resonance: they capture the movement of dances and the painted marks on bodies in nocturnal ceremony. For the Western eye, it is hard not to read these large pieces as contoured transcriptions of the rise and fall of country, and trace in their sharp, rough vortex patterns a raw, free-floating energy: they have the look of lines cast by a magnetic field, or of scientific diagrams.
This is in large part because Napaltjarri, unlike many female desert artists, favours a modified two-colour system: ground and mark, consistently, with the lines and arcs lightly accented. Where she departs from this system, as, increasingly, in her latest work, it is purely to enhance its effects with the slightest colour emphasis. This lends her canvases the look of theorems or stripped skeletons of the desert worldview: the whole structure is legible.
One is left with an art quite devoid of rhetoric or sentiment. What remains is the power of the artist’s emotions, mapped, delineated: "Here it is, my country," Napaltjarri seems to say. "Here it is, in all its beauty and its strength: and can you bear to look at it?"
Much of the tone of the work stems from the unusual way it is made. Napaltjarri scorns the paintbrush and the dabbed dot. She works with sticks: two sticks, with which she lays down her deep desert orange on a black ground before scratching the sandy-coloured surface away to reveal the bones of the dreaming landscape below. She is gouging out the form: it is a method used, among contemporary Papunya Tula artists, only by the much-admired Johnny Yungut, whose work has a smoother, more polished sheen.
What is she driving at? Interviews, it would be fair to say, reveal little: Napaltjarri, who has no English, is not equipped with a critical vocabulary. Certainly these works tumble from her in a skilled, intended fashion, but they come without Western concepts attached. In that, they are products of the desert, and of pre-contact times now receding from view.
There are some things we can say about Napaltjarri, beyond the mere facts of her biography. She is a determined woman, with a rather pronounced style in the clothes she favours for city visits: pink sandshoes and multicoloured socks are special trademarks. We can establish that she was once a splendid hunter, and she still gathers bush tomatoes with an obsessional enthusiasm.
As to the internal motives that fuel her work, we know little. And this is one of the oddest aspects of Australia’s protracted romance with desert art. Not only do we have little understanding, on the psychological or social level, of the particular artists whose paintings evoke such strong responses in us; not only are they, despite the endless streams of enthusiastic praise for their art, total strangers to us: the truth is that scarcely any attempt has yet been made to know them and present them as individuals with lives, characters and outlooks of their own.
It is a task that awaits, and as the old desert artists pass into oblivion it seems to press upon us each day with greater force.
Tjunkiya Napaltjarri: A New Way is at Utopia Art, Sydney, until May 10. Papunya 2008 is at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, until May 3.