<>Papunya
Acrylic on Canvas, .
154 x 123 cm (60.6 x 48.4 ins)
The Papunya-Tula artists
have received great critical acclaim from the Western art world with their
paintings of traditional motifs and depictions of the Dreamtime expressed
in codified symbols and painted as an intricate surface of small dots.
The paintings produced at Papunya are brilliant works of art both as cultural
artifacts and as stylised geometric designs. The latter having a direct
accord with current western schools of art.
Papunya Tula artists conceptualise the landscape with the use of a symbolic
code and use elements of this code to construct pictorial syntax. A comparatively
small number of ideographs form the basic visual language of the artists.
Some of these are highly schematic such as circles, lines and dots (also
a geometric point or centre) whilst others are iconic such as human footprints
and animal tracks. The schematic U which usually signifies presence is
an abstraction of the trace left by a person sitting cross-legged on the
ground.
The paintings, often very large in format, are painted in acrylic using
a range of colour that reflects the changing light of the Australian Centre
- deep pinks, golds, red and ochre. They have a tremendous presence, and
at the same time a serenity about them.