The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  At this time Christine Watson, Coo-ee’s curator for the previous five years, was living at Balgo Hills studying Balgo women’s aesthetics and ceremony.35 She forged strong ties with a number of important female painters, most notably Freda Tjemma Napanangka, Bridget Mati Mudjidel and Eubena Nampitjin.

  Ena Gimme Nungurrayi, Eubena’s daughter by her first husband, was an especially gifted and promising artist. When she began in 1989, her mother’s artistic influence was immediately evident. The circular motifs centred upon two waterholes from Eubena’s country, surrounded by a grove of trees. Her paintings were informal, open and colourful, and preoccupied with the abundance of food. In her best works, the texture resembles impasto with tessellated sections of the canvas featuring unpredictable gestural sweeps and a bold use of raw colour. She painted for just three years, but during her very brief career she forged a unique style.

  Shortly after Ena passed away in 1992, at 36 years of age, another of Eubena’s daughters, Nyula Mutji, died of meningitis. I remember sitting with Christine on either side of Eubena, holding her hands. We were surrounded by grieving women at their sorry camp. I have never had a more heart-wrenching experience. Shortly afterwards, Eubena left Balgo Hills deeply depressed. She moved back to her homeland near Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. She did not return until lured back almost two years later with the news that a significant amount of money from the sale of her artworks was waiting for her at the art centre.

  Two of my other favourite painters were Millie and Tommy Skeen who moved to Mulun in the early 1990s. Tall and lanky, Tommy was a swashbuckling figure. The old cowboy was never seen without his battered old sweat-stained Stetson. The couple’s development as artists underwent a number of stylistic evolutions, beginning with early works that were characteristically dark and earthy. Millie later became a leader amongst those women who were attracted to brighter colours.

  Patrick (Olodoodi) Tjungurrayi, who is now considered one of the most prominent Papunya Tula artists, was amongst a group of painters who moved back and forth between Balgo Hills, Kintore and Kiwirrkurra. He’d been only eight years old when he arrived at the old Balgo mission, while other family members moved south. He created his first small paintings at Balgo in 1985 and within two years was joined by his older brother Brandy and younger sister Elizabeth Nyumi Nungurrayi. Patrick met and married Miriam Olodoodi, Lucy Yukenbarri’s sister, at the church that he helped build when in his late 20s. He returned to Kintore shortly thereafter, while she remained behind. Over time, Patrick and Brandy’s paintings showed the influence of both regional styles as they moved between their Pintupi homeland and Balgo Hills for important gatherings and ceremonies.

  All of the men with the greatest ritual and cultural authority during the formative period at Balgo Hills have now passed away.36 They included Mick Gill Tjakamarra, Wimmitji Tjapangarti, Donkeyman Lee Tjupurrula, Sunfly Tjampitjin, Sam Tjampitjin and Johnny Mosquito Tjapangarti.

  Sunfly Tjampitjin and Wimmitji Tjapangarti were old men in their mid 60s with skinny legs and fly-away hair when I first met them. I don’t think I ever saw Wimmitji stand up without assistance. I can still see them both, leaning into the gritty wind, determinedly plodding from their camp across the dirt to the art centre. They were so frail they used their paintings like walking sticks, balancing on one corner while the diagonal one stuck in the sand. This is why their paintings would often arrive in Sydney with a hole in the corner of the canvas, or a corner worn right off. It was probably a mystery to other dealers, but it always made me laugh. They were both very serious artists nonetheless. Both sought to record in intimate detail the site maps of the desert country in which they grew up.

  Two Old Masters – Tommy Skeen Tjakamarra outside Warlayirti art centre, 1996.

  Sunfly’s early efforts made a significant contribution to the first exhibition of art from the Balgo community that was held in Perth in 1986. Hosted by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art from the Sandy Desert was the first public recognition of the nascent art movement at Balgo Hills, and foreshadowed their subsequent commercial success.

  No more than 300 works were produced each year during the early days of the Walayirti art centre.37 During Sunfly’s entire seven-year painting career, he produced a total of just 62 works.38 Yet these are so powerful that during his lifetime his renown was unparalleled. In fact he only painted when the early art coordinators visited him at his camp in Yagga Yagga. Working in this isolated settlement meant he developed his bold aesthetic independently of other Balgo artists, who relied more on dotting and parallel currents of lines. His paintings have an almost primeval quality. The travelling paths that dominate them illustrate how closely connected to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle he remained to the end of his days.

  Sam Tjampitjin was a lot younger than his older brother Sunfly, but also joined the important ‘culture men’ exploring aspects of their Dreamings on small canvas boards. His grid-like paintings were characteristic of Kukatja male aesthetics, with their preference for formal, linear work. Over time he borrowed from the key geometric designs seen on men’s ceremonial objects, without literally referencing them. He added to the power of his compositions by stripping out any superfluous secondary imagery.

  Wimmitji Tjapangarti, the incomparable cartographer, Balgo Hills, 1989.

  After Sunfly passed away in 1996, Wimmitji miraculously continued to paint despite his almost total blindness. He was a cultural custodian of the highest degree, a Mapan (traditional healer) of unsurpassed knowledge and ceremonial importance in Wangkatjungka society. Even though Wimmitji spoke very little English, his intimate knowledge of his country and Dreaming narratives proved extremely helpful in assisting Ronald and Catherine Berndt with their book The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia (1989).39 He also helped Father Anthony Peile to compile the Kukatja dictionary and various articles on medical subjects.

  Wimmitji’s earliest paintings contain a vast amount of sacred lore. Their intricacy and textural richness were achieved through spontaneous outpourings of dotting and myriad surface treatments.40 His painting style and earthy palette gave the best of his works a look of great age, and this added to their ‘authenticity’. From the early 1990s until his death in 2000, he seemed to live thoroughly immersed in his Dreaming. He could be found muttering verses from the song cycles of his country as he painted, completely oblivious to the world around him. Watching him paint, as he sat on the concrete slab in front of Lucy Yukenbarri’s house at bottom camp, gave the impression that he travelled through an interior space beyond the physical dimension. With eyes closed to barely visible slits, and tiny hands shaking as he applied dots to the canvas, he seemed far, far away, in direct communication with his ancestors, and the spirits of the land.

  Sunfly Tjampitjin, Tingari [native cat] Dreaming, 1988. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 120 x 80 cm.

  As the 1980s drew to a close, paintings from Balgo Hills were included in the exhibition Mythscapes at the National Gallery of Victoria, A Myriad of Dreaming at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, and at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. Though the Balgo Hills artists were gaining in prominence, interest in their work was yet to eclipse that of other regions. The inaugural exhibition of Balgo art took place in 1986, but it was not to be until 1989 that the first commercial exhibition of their work, Warlayirti Artists – Continuing Links with the Land, was held at my own Coo-ee Gallery. This decisively launched Balgo art on the eastern seaboard. For our following show, Warlayirti Artists Homelands, in 1992, I hired a publicist, and though my gallery was small, Christine Watson and I managed to hang 72 paintings. Peter Ross, the host of the ABC TV Sunday Arts program, interviewed me about the work. Fortunately, it was screened as the last item before the most important international rugby clash of the year. Millions watched the piece, and the Balgo show was a complete sell-out. The power and variety of the work had so inspired Coo-ee’s curator, Christine Watson, that she decided to go to Balgo to research the women’s paintings.
I made several visits to the community myself to personally select works for our gallery’s ongoing presentation and to select the images for a book that would be used to launch the artists worldwide.41 By 1995, the quality and impact of Balgo paintings was so strong that art critic John McDonald concluded his large Sydney Morning Herald review of our exhibition On the Trail of the Kingfisher by stating, ‘there is nothing in the world of contemporary art that can match the work of these artists’.

  That was all it took. The Balgo Hills painters were now the ‘hot new thing’.

  Wimmitji Tjapangarti’s cartographic masterpiece, Nyirkalpa, near the Canning Stock Route. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 120 x 85 cm.

  ON THE ROAD

  The hit musical Bran Nue Dae and Rover Thomas’ Gurrir Gurrir ceremony are both on-the-road stories: popular entertainments that reveal unique aspects of Kimberley culture. Both deal with the consequences of straying too far from tradition, and serve as political morality tales dished up with humour and dance. The story of Jimmy Pike and that of the East Kimberley artists of the 1980s share a common sense of serendipity. At the oddest moments tragedy is transformed into triumph, and characters who were on the point of despair suddenly sing for joy and dance on air.

  Pike was a young Walmajarri stockman who’d never seen a white man until he came in from the desert as an adolescent. One night in 1980 he got drunk, killed a man, and went to jail. On the inside, where he could have rotted away for decades, his talent was discovered by two art teachers, Steve Culley and David Wroth. Pike’s dynamic creative energy inspired the two men to start a small business called Desert Designs, which was to become an icon of Australian fashion, and make Pike an international star. His story, like that of Bran Nue Dae, presents yet another example of Aboriginal culture’s openness to innovation, and the ability of its finest artists to shift into the white mainstream on their own terms.

  Pike’s story connects directly to what made the first ten years of my own Coo-ee Art Gallery so incredibly exciting. Jimmy’s vibrant and bold designs on domestic textiles, apparel and limited edition art prints motivated us as we developed our own range of art and fine crafts. We sourced and supplied fabrics for Bruce Goold, later of Mambo fame, and for the Tiwi screen printers on Bathurst Island. From these we made a range of clothing and furnishings that stamped their imprimatur on our own outlet. We were also influenced by other Aboriginal artists such as Lawrence Leslie, a Kamilaroi designer, whose work was promoted in fashion by the creative genius Linda Jackson. We were inspired by the relief prints of non-Indigenous Australian artists, such as Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor and Grace Cossington-Smith. East coast businesses like Coo-ee Emporium, the Rainbow Serpent and Jenny Kee’s Flamingo Park offered a handmade alternative to mass-manufactured Japanese souvenirs. We were not alone. By the early 1980s, several commercial galleries in Sydney and Melbourne were sourcing handmade crafts that were a unique reflection of the Australian environment. Amongst them were Distelfink and Makers Mark. Contemporary fashion and accessories designed by Jimmy Pike slotted perfectly into the mix.

  Steve Culley later explained to me that no-one taught Pike how to make art. ‘He had that intuitive ability already. All we did was open a few doors for him.’42 Surprisingly, his jail term brought Pike other benefits. The lost years of his early childhood returned to him during the long hours of solitude and he determined to renew those sacred connections. It was in prison, too, that Pike met Pat Lowe, a Britishborn psychologist who had dreamed of coming to Australia as a child and had taught in East Africa. On his release, in 1986, Pike and Lowe became a couple, and together they returned to his desert homeland where they lived for the next three and a half years. His paintings and prints, representing maps and narratives about his country, incorporated traditional patterns that were characterised by bold lines and intense colour. Desert Designs, by now a conceptual design company, transposed Pike’s traditional imagery and patterns onto fabric, clothing and domestic items. With Jimmy as their artistic leader, Culley and Wroth began working with a number of other artists including Doris Gingingara and Martin Dougal. The new industry they created continued to develop throughout the 1980s and 1990s. They ethically manufactured and licensed Aboriginal designs for some of the world’s most prestigious companies including Sheraton, Speedo, Mitsubishi, ASICS, and Oroton. These appeared on a huge array of products and accessories including ski wear, beach wear, luggage, men’s and women’s apparel, carpets and furnishings. The royalty fees and sales of original artworks enabled Jimmy Pike to live a free and independent life as an artist in his own country, where he built an outstation from which he rarely ventured.

  Jimmy Pike: ‘ My work is painting and drawing, telling stories about places where Dreamtime people travelled through my country. They set down the Law for real people today, wherever they are. That’s what I paint.’

  During the 1980s, when the Australian art world was beginning to open its eyes to the different styles and strands of contemporary Aboriginal art, Jimmy Pike’s paintings and prints were exhibited alongside those of other Kimberley artists. They fitted just as readily, however, into shows featuring the younger urban artists emerging from city art schools who had been brought up in suburban surroundings. Pike’s powerful and distinctive use of colour and line reserved for him an expressionistic niche in the midst of this growing diversity. At the same time, Desert Designs was finding its place as a new icon of Australian fashion and contributing significantly to international perceptions of Australian culture. By the close of the decade, Pike had become one of Australia’s best known Aboriginal artists, receiving important commissions and travelling to southern cities and to overseas openings and events. He gained a national and then an international reputation through successful exhibitions in China, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, Italy, France, Germany, the United States and England, and produced work relating to his experiences in each of these countries.

  While Jimmy Pike’s career flourished, a trained printmaker, Duncan Kentish, started to work with the Walmajarri artists Peter Skipper and Jarinyanu David Downs. The raw intensity of works by Pike, Skipper and Downs, especially their strong graphic prints, drew inspiration from the Great Sandy Desert and the flowering vegetation surrounding its waterholes. They were all promoted independently of any established art centres, and became the first ‘art stars’ of the growing Kimberley movement.

  I will never forget a chance encounter with Kentish and Downs at Marla Bore on the Stuart Highway, five hours south of Alice Springs. Just a month or two before Jarinyanu’s death, as Anne and I pushed north, they were heading south to Adelaide for an exhibition. Even on the side of the road, Downs cut a commanding figure, resplendent in his white shirt and pants, his demeanour gentle but authoritative. He was very conscious of himself as an artist.

  ‘I’m different,’ he would claim, while his peers would describe his directness by exclaiming, ‘He’ll tell you right out.’43

  Downs was born in the Great Sandy Desert during the 1920s. After leaving his traditional lands in his 20s, he spent the next two decades droving cattle and working in the gold mines around Halls Creek. He eventually settled in Fitzroy Crossing, where he produced artefacts from the 1960s onward. His earliest works on canvas and paper, using traditional ochres with natural resins as a binder, date from 1980. Figures appeared as dramatic dark silhouettes against a white acrylic background, but they were merely one element within larger compositions. The influence of Christianity could be seen in many of his earliest works; however, as his career developed, he wed his Christian beliefs to specific cultural sites, and in the process depicted Ngarrangkani, Dreaming ancestors, in human form.

  Duncan Kentish and David Downs.

  David Downs with an image of Kurtal the ancestral rain man who travelled to the Kimberley as a cyclone, creating permanent water sources.

  Downs’ primary vehicle for expressing this two-way religious philosophy was the song cycle of Kurtal, the ancestral rainman born on a di
stant island who travelled to the Kimberley as a cyclone. As he swept inland, Kurtal created ‘living water’ (permanent water sources) and visited other rain men, occasionally gaining valuable items from them through trickery and magic. The figure of Kurtal, often depicted with ceremonial headdress, appeared throughout Jarinyanu’s entire oeuvre. Other than occasional canvases concerned with Christian themes such as Whale Fish Vomiting Jonah (1993) and Jesus Preach’im All People (1986), it is the Kurtal figure that filled canvas after canvas until his death in 1995. Jarinyanu’s success at bridging these two separate cosmologies can be seen as part of a broader tradition, evidenced by cultural exchange in the Kimberley, predating European contact. Like thousands of other Aboriginal people he was able to embrace Christianity without weakening his commitment to ritual law.

  Jarinyanu came to terms with the concept of individual fame early in his meteoric career. He was modest and unassuming even when standing in front of his portrait painted by Robert Hannaford for Australia’s premier portrait award, the Archibald Prize. His ability to negotiate his way in the white world greatly influenced his success. His friendship with Duncan Kentish brought many rewards, particularly solo exhibitions in galleries such as Bonython-Meadmore Gallery (1988), Roar 2 Studios (1991), Chapman Gallery (1993) and Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney (1995). He was always presented as a contemporary artist alongside non-Indigenous artists and, at the time of his death, was considered one of the great stars of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement.