While an overproduction of Indigenous painting has resulted in much generic work, the best painters are creating works with singular aesthetic qualities. PRUE GIBSON examines the work of one such artist.

It is human nature to draw associations. We are forever likening one artist’s work to another. These compulsive games of association, which many of us suffer, are due to a fundamental Western yearning for classification and order. Finding patterns. If anything, this ritualistic devotion to systems of cataloguing is even more apparent in the art world today than ever before.

In this climate of classification and order, it becomes even more difficult to understand the mystical power of Aboriginal artists such as Kudditji Kngwarreye. He was born in 1928 at Alhalkere, on the edge of Utopia Station, Northern Territory, two hundred and fifty kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. He is the younger brother of Emily Kame Kngwarreye. As a child, he learned the lores and dreamings of the emu. As a middle-aged man, he held the responsibility of an Elder and taught younger boys to hunt emu and to pass on the practical skills and knowledge of the ceremonial sites on Utopia Station.

The lease of Utopia Station was ceded to Aboriginal people in the mid-1970s. There, according to Jennifer Isaacs in her publication Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, the Aboriginal locals worked cattle, hunted kangaroo, gathered seeds and grasses, and collected yam seeds, the favourite food of emus. Isaacs asserts that local Utopian women traded necklaces, coolamons (carrying dishes), dancing boards and sticks with travellers along the highway from Alice to Darwin. During this time, Kudditji Kngwarreye mustered cattle and worked in various goldmines in the Northern Territory. Now, due to extreme and ongoing illness, he resides full-time in Alice Springs.

Kudditji Kngwarreye’s colour-block paintings inspire further enquiry into the ideology and authorship of Indigenous art. For instance, does first contact with station managers and art centre curators (and later, dealers and collectors) adversely affect contemporary Aboriginal painting? Is it original work or is this very question a pitiful misunderstanding of the personal and collective philosophies of Indigenous artists?

According to Kate Owen, who has held two large solo exhibitions of Kngwarreye’s work, Kudditji first started painting in 1986. He was encouraged to paint traditional dot paintings — outlines which were filled in — and these were dotted Emu Dreaming paintings. However, in the 1990s he started painting in his more abstract style — a version of colour field — which became his signature style. This distinctive mode of painting is constituted by squares, or lozenges, of colour. From a distance these blocks of colour appear to be gradations of saturated light. But on closer viewing, within each block of colour a pandemonium of spontaneous complementary-coloured brushwork has been achieved.

Kngwarreye’s absorption with the effects of light, across his country, and his almost scientific approach to the nuances and temporality of colour, has resulted in commentators likening his work to Claude Monet. Equally, the monumental, spiritual and even transcendental experience of his magnificent epochs of colour might suggest associations with Mark Rothko. I found it hard not to think of Philip Guston’s 1950s and 1960s abstract paintings, where bold and assured brushstrokes articulate the experience of colour.

So is it really so terrible to draw these associations? Yes, and I am to blame as much as the next person. Despite it being part of human nature, it is lazy and apocryphal thinking because Indigenous art exists in a realm of its own. Kudditji Kngwarreye’s paintings are an interpretation of his travels across Utopia; they are his versions of cultural emu creationist stories, some of which are violent or threatening, and they are an invocation of an individual perspective, on behalf of others.

Often described as aerial perspective, because of the way many Aboriginal artists paint the land from what seems to be a hovering position above the ground, the term is not quite appropriate. Firstly, many Indigenous artists would not have travelled by air until late in their careers, if at all. Secondly, Kngwarreye’s paintings do not offer the perspective of the land which might be viewed from a plane. In other words, they are without perspective.

Perhaps the best way to describe Kngwarreye’s artistic outlook (or compositional view) is to mention methods of narrative writing. It is as though these paintings were made through an omniscient point of view. In literature this means a God-like overall voice, whereby the writer can shift from one character to the next. Few novels are written like this — most are first person or third person, following the point of view of one character alone. Although Kngwarreye’s paintings are personal, they are also collective. They document the stories of an entire people. They are closer to narrative than traditional landscape scenes. The fact that Indigenous artists paint the land, and the stories of the land, distracts many viewers into preconceived notions of what a landscape should look like, rather than perceiving a crucial extra element — the absence of unilateral authority.

Within each patch or lozenge of colour, painted on a black background, is a rich assortment of colour gradations. Songs, hunts, stories, travels and the food and water of the Anmatyerre country are all intended, by the artist, to infuse the paintings. The histories of the Sandover and Bundey Rivers which cross Utopia Station also secretly inform these paintings. Although he now lives in Alice Springs, Kudditji still continues to paint the ancestor stories.

Kngwarreye’s sister Emily Kame Kngwarreye has received fervent attention since the late 1980s, with monographs published and much curatorial research completed on her life and work. Chandler Coventry, Gabrielle Pizzi, Christopher Hodges, Ace Bourke and many other art-world figures discovered the paintings of Emily soon after 1989, when she first began painting colourful abstract paintings on canvas.

She is one of many desert artists to contradict previous notions of what contemporary Indigenous painting means, and its intent. Her work also draws attention to why contemporary Aboriginal paintings attract such strong associations with western abstract painting, despite little contact between the two. Kudditji Kngwarreye’s work throws up similar points of influence and authorship to consider. He has not, as yet, received such close attention … but, no doubt, he soon will.

Prue Gibson

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Images from top:

Kudditji Kngwarreye and his wife Charlotte.

Kudditji Kngwarreye, My Country, acrylic on linen, 205 x 280cm.

Kudditji Kngwarreye, My Country, acrylic on linen, 180 x 205cm.

Kudditji Kngwarreye, My Country, acrylic on linen, 117 x 140cm.