A pioneer dot painter and Aboriginal artist... ancient iconographies can be enjoyed for their abstract qualities - their form, high color, etc.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Johnson, Vivien

Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum

Reference

Art Gallery of South Australia

Dreamings of the Desert: Aboriginal Dot Paintings of the Western Desert

Arts & Photography

Aboriginal artists re-enact the creation, the Dreaming, a sacred art envisioned today on board, canvas and textiles in colorful and energetic U-shapes, dots, concentric circles, journey lines and superimposed images.

Dreaming Of The Desert: Aboriginal Dot Paintings Of The Western Desert

Part art history, part detective story, this gripping insider’s account of the Papunya art movement—which was centered around the 1,000 small, painted panels created at the remote northern territory Aboriginal settlement of Papunya during 1971 and 1972—goes beyond a mere discussion of the astronomical auction prices in the late 1990s that first drew many people’s attention to these pieces. Celebrating Australian art history, this study explores the background of the artists themselves as well as restoring the boards’ historical and cultural significance as the first inscriptions of the religious beliefs and sacred visual language of the Western Desert peoples. It additionally looks at the controversies that surrounded the paintings at the time of their creation, the role of teacher Geoffrey Bardon, the depiction of sacred imagery, what they mean to the artists’ descendants, and the distant worlds of art auctions and international exhibitions—telling the larger story of Aboriginal art in Australia and beyond.

Once Upon a Time in Papunya

History & Criticism

NewSouth

Through widely researched biographies of more than 200 artists, this book chronicles the beginnings of the Western Desert art movement and the phenomenal development of its founding art company over four decades, illuminating lives balanced between first contact and international stardom, poverty and record auction prices. Lavishly illustrated with portraits and artwork, this account celebrates the individual lives of the artists, showcasing the importance of what they share—family and country, significant sites, tjukurrpa (dreaming) and life histories.

Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists

IAD Press

Icons of the Desert is an exhibition catalog produced by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University for a show featuring forty-nine "dot-paintings" produced by Aboriginal artists from the settlement of Panpunya. Dot-painting has become an art instantly associated with Aboriginal Australia. In the more than thirty-five years since the advent of this movement, Papunya works have been widely exhibited and acquired by private collectors and museums in Australia, and increasingly abroad.
Icons of the Desert is the first book to focus on the founding expressions of Papunya art. It examines their origins in the paintings produced in Papunya in the Western Desert during the years 1971 to 1973, after the Sydney schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon provided Aboriginal men with art materials and encouraged them to paint on Masonite, against the wishes of Australian government officials. These paintings claim a unique status. Only around six hundred were made. They are also the first painted works to transfer the designs of desert ceremonial imagery to a permanent surface. Beyond this rarity and historical significance, however, the visual qualities of Papunya boards make them a uniquely appealing body of work. They have the freshness of trial and error, of experiment by artists who were seasoned in other media adjusting to an unfamiliar format.
Illustrated with full-color plates of the forty-nine exhibited works by such great artists as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Icons of the Desert features numerous color figures of comparative works and documentary photographs of the original artists at work, some never before published, and a chronological catalog documenting the works' history and iconography, edited by project curator Roger Benjamin. The leading Indigenous curator in the field, Hetti Perkins, contributed the preface. Roger Benjamin authored the lead essay, which situates the works in their historical and cultural context.
Fred Myers, an internationally renowned cultural anthropologist who undertook his doctoral research at Papunya when the movement was still in formation, has written an essay on the stylistic development of one of the painting men he knew personally, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi. Vivien Johnson, the most prominent Australian author on Western and Central Desert art, writes on a second important artist in the collection, Charlie Tarawa Tjungurrayi. In addition, the memories of relatives of deceased painters in the exhibition are presented in the form of an interview conducted by Dick Kimber, who was a schoolteacher at Papunya in 1971 when the paintings were first produced.

Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya (Distributed for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University)

Myers, Fred

Benjamin, Roger

Perkins, Hetti

Kimber, R. G.

Cornell Univ Herbert F Johnson

At last, The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri presents a comprehensive account of the work of this extraordinary artist. Over 60 major paintings, all with detailed annotations and spanning more than two decades of his output, are reproduced in this volume. It makes accessible the development of a master painter of the Anmatyerre tribe, one of the founders and leaders of Western Desert art. The encyclopedic range, depth, conceptual complexity, technical skill and inventiveness represented here will astonish even the keenest admirers of his work. So might the obscure destiny - until now - of such great art in the display and consumption systems of the western art world. In the contemporary medium of acrylic on canvas, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri expresses both his custodianship of the ancient Dreaming stories of Aboriginal Central Australia recounted in his paintings, and the inexhaustible freshness and brilliance of his own artistic vision.

The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Individual Artists

Craftsman House

Pretty good apart from front hard cover bottom right corner a bit of tear. Ex library with library marks at first two pages plus library Dewey system at the very lower spine. Otherwise book still in very good condition.

Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert: A Biographical Dictionary

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