Lot 57: MURTIYARRU SUNFLY TJAMPITJIN , WANAYARRA THE RAINBOW SNAKE IN THE ARTIST'S COUNTRY 1990

Bears artist's name, size and Warlayirti Artists catalogue number 573/90 on the reverse Synthetic polymer paint on canvas

149.5 by 74 cm

Warlayirti Artists, Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills)
Private collection, Canberra

A major work by one of the early doyens of the Balgo school of painting, the work belongs to the small group of Tjampitjin?s canvases which feature bold shapes of flat colour in asymmetrical compositions. Other major works in the group are the earlier Poyarri, 1988, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery (illustrated on the Gallery?s website), and Yapinti ? Pinki Dreaming, 1991, sold at Sotheby?s, Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, July 2004, lot 71, and illustrated in Cowan, J., Wirrimanu: Aboriginal art from the Balgo Hills, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1994, p.112, plate 45

Tjampitjin was represented by several works in the first exhibition of Balgo paintings, Art from the Great Sandy Desert, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia at the end on 1986. He is listed as Sandfly, Djambidjin (Tjampitjin) subsection, in the accompanying exhibition brochure that includes an introduction by the eminent anthropologists, Ronald and Catherine Berndt who had conducted fieldwork at Balgo from 1958.

The area depicted in this painting is a major ceremonial site on the north shore of Lake Mackay. The features of the landscape were created by the ancestral Goanna Men whose path is rendered as the vertical yellow meander at the centre left, leading down to the waterhole of Tarawarra in the lower left corner of the painting. The other waterholes are Martjapartal and Yiwantju, in the lower left and upper right corners respectively. Wanayarra the Rainbow Snake also lives in the region that is marked by a series of sandhills (red and blue verticals) and salt lakes as depicted by emerald green patch at the centre of the painting.

This painting is sold with an accompaying Warlayirti Artists certificate.