Painted in 1990 at Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills), Western Australia
Warlayirti Artists, catalogue number 20/90
Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Lawson Menzies, Aboriginal Art, Sydney, 30 May 2006, lot 58 (illus.)
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection
Bonhams, The Grundy Collection, Sydney, 26 June 2013, lot 90
Private collection, USA

Housed in a wooden box frame. No visible repairs or restorations. In very good condition overall.
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Cf., Anne Marie Brody, Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, pp49-62, for illustrations and discussion of several works by the artist from 1990 and 1991, in the Holmes-à-Court Collection, Western Australia.

Wimmitji Tjapangarti is regarded as the doyen of the painting movement at the remote community of Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills) in the Tanamai Desert in north-western Australia. His status as a major ceremonial leader, his deep ancestral knowledge, his renown as a mapan (healer), and as builder of bridges between cultures is reflected in his extraordinary body of work in the public domain. While never overly prolific in terms of numbers of paintings, Wimmitji’🦋s influence on the art ✨of Balgo has been profound.

Born about 1924 at Kutakuta near Percival Lakes, southwest of Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert, Wimmitji lived in the traditional way until the 1940s when he was attracted to the Catholic mission at Balgo Hills where the rest of his family had previously taken up residence. He was soon to establish himself as an influential member of the community that housed people belonging to several language groups but where Kukatja is the lingua franca. In the years immediately after World War II, Wimmitji assisted the eminent Australian anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in their researches into desert culture and for whom he produced a number of paintings to illustrate ceremonial practices and traditional narratives. The anthropologists also recorded a number of ancestral narratives as told by Wimmitji and some of these appear in anthology The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia (published by Penguin Books in 1989). Wimmitji also guided the Pallotine missionary Father Peile in his academic study of traditional healing and he contributed to the compilation of the Kukatja-English dictionary༒.

Wimmitji first painted in acrylic in 1981-82 when he was among a small group of elders who undertook an adult education course, a common program in Aboriginal communities at the time. In 1986, he was among the leading artists in the landmark exhibition Aboriginal Art from the Great Sandy Desert at the Art Gallery of Western Australia that put the art of Balgo on the map. By 1988 he began to paint on a regular basis and by then he had married the painter Eubena Nampitjin (c.1929-2013), and theirs was to develop into one of the great collaborations in Australian art. They would often work on each oth🌺er's p😼aintings and Wimmitji's style had a marked influence on that of his wife.

Wimmitji often preferred to apply the paint directly onto the canvas with his fingers instead of a brush in imitation of the act of body painting in ritual and of making mosaics on the ceremonial ground. For him, this emphasised the continuity between the various art forms, and in turn incorporated the new medium of acrylic paint on canvas into his repertoire. While a wide range of colours was made available to Balgo artists in the late 1980s, by and large Wimmitji preferred the hues that best replicated the traditional palette or red, yellow, black and white. Dingo and Rainbow Snake Dreaming, 1990, is quintessentially in Wimmitji's style: the application of paint in irregular fields of dotting, the forms of the Snake and the paw prints of the ൩ancestral Wild Dog ou🐷tlined in white, and the dynamic drawing all combine to produce a shimmering surface redolent with the supernatural forces unleashed by the ancestral beings.

^WC