In Sight/ Arts & Entertainment: The 'Dreamings' of a natural artist

It's the stuff of fiction: An illiterate 78-year-old Aboriginal woman in Australia's central Simpson Desert picks up a paintbrush for the first time and sweeps it across the canvas. The result is soon acclaimed by the Australian art world as superlative abstract contemporary art. Now we can judge for ourselves, with the well-documented exhibition of about 120 works from the 3,000 paintings produced by Emily Kame Kngwarreye in the last eight years of her life, now at the National Museum of Art, Osaka until April 13.

According to NMAO curator Yasuyuki Nakai, Kngwarreye lacked any training or exposure to Western art. "Yet her paintings transcend the categorization of 'ethnic' or primitive art. What she has produced is fine art by any measure," he said. Indeed, art critics have identified similarities between Kngwarreye's works--her fields of dots, undulating stripes and multi-hued slabs of color--and those of major late 20th-century Western abstract artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. However, her art was of a piece with her life. Rather than expressing a formal aesthetic concept or personal ideals, Kngwarreye's paintings depict Aboriginal creation myths and their world view, or Dreamings. As a leader of Aboriginal women's rituals, she hoped to pass on this lore to future generations through song, ritual and art, including body painting, sand drawing and acrylic paint on canvas.

To a surprising degree, her work can be regarded as figurative rather than abstract, depictions of the only world she knew, the ocher-hued desert country that her Aboriginal clan called Alhalkere. The tangled white lines that cram the 24-square-meter black canvas of "Big Yam Dreaming" (1995), for example, succeed as abstract expressions, but they also suggest the earthen fissures that develop above the long-roots of the edible pencil yam. The riot of lines, dots and primary colors that fill the 22 canvases of "The Alhalker[e] Suite" (1993) remind some critics of aerial views of the flowering desert after it rains, a period that Kngwarreye referred to as "green time." The parallels with Kngwarreye's daily life are made clear in the accompanying display of Aboriginal ritual wooden carvings and art, some of which she produced herself. An understanding of her work and cultural milieu can also be gained by reading the thorough and, thankfully, bilingual exhibition catalog.

The show's layout captures the artist's surprising progression of stylistic modes over a career that only lasted eight years. Many of her earliest works reprise her previous experiments in batik dying, marked by sketched animal or skeletal figures overplayed by lines and dots in desert reds and yellows. Her first work, "Emu Woman" (1988-89), recreates ritual body painting with clearly outlined breasts and a torso striped and dotted in black, red, yellow and white.

Kngwarreye later moved on to canvases filled with multicolored dots, some of her strongest work. But unlike the static "dot painting" of many other desert artists, she sampled from a vast artistic palette of approaches and techniques. Nakai said about these works, "Kngwarreye intuitively mastered techniques that other artists have studied formally, like the use of rhythm and overlapping colors. She instinctively knew to set white dots as the grounding below colored dots to express depth, to vary hot and cold hues, to express dynamism through her use of lines." A fetching set of five untitled pastel-toned panels done in 1993, for example, was painted by dipping her paintbrush in two or more colors, forcefully thrusting the brush onto the canvas and twirling it until it created splayed spheres that suggest fields of sunflowers at sunset or hillsides abloom in pink carnations. The balance of color and overall composition is surprisingly assured.

The title of another impressive dotted painting, "Kam[e]" (1991), suggests that it depicts thousands of yam seeds ("kame" means yam seed), but the complexity and movement of this swirling, multicolored sea of dots also put me in mind of constellations in the night sky.

Later stages of Kngwarreye's paintings featured lines in lieu of, or in addition to, dots. Sometimes the lines echo the linear forms of ritual body marking, while other paintings resemble turbocharged multicolored scribbles that recreate what Kngwarreye called "sacred grasses." She often worked on huge canvases, using her entire body to drive the brush as far as her arm extended, and finishing on the average of one large painting a day--not bad for a woman in her 80s.

Many of her works feature the yam, an important element in her cosmological stories. The massive "Big Yam" (1996) is a swirl of pink, yellow and white lines on a black background that Nakai pointed to as an example of Kngwarreye's expert control of dynamic lines and color amplitude. He added, "Perhaps because she never learned art formally, there were no conceptual obstacles to direct expression of her creative spirit."

Although Kngwarreye died in 1996, her work continues to gain acclaim. Nakai mentioned that one of her paintings sold fairly recently at auction for more than A$ 1 million (more than 90 million yen). This show may inspire those of us who wonder about the provenance of future pensions to also take up a paintbrush. As Kngwarreye would say, it's never too late.

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"Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye" continues at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, through April 13. See map and listing on Page 28.

The exhibition travels to the National Art Center, Tokyo (May 28-July 28).(IHT/Asahi: March 21,2008)