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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Jul 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  29
• Lot Description:
  Rover Thomas (Joolama)
  (circa 1926-1998)
  Untitled (1996)
  natural earth pigments and synthetic binders on linen
  signed 'ROVER' verso; bears Waringarri Aboriginal Arts cat. no. AP0895 verso
  73.5 x 100 cm
• Provenance:
  Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Western Australia; Private Collection, Queensland
• Notes:
  After a life as a stockman on various cattle stations in the East Kimberley, away from his own country of Kukatja/Wangkajunga in the Great Sandy Desert, Rover Thomas commenced his innovative painting in the early 1980s, whilst living at the community of mainly Gija and Miriwoong people at Turkey Creek (now known as Warmun). The early paintings of Thomas and many Gija/Miriwoong painters owed much to the genesis of the Kurrirr Kurrirr balga (ceremony). This ceremony, an everyday public camp ceremony fused song, dance and image (boards) with ancestral stories, the recent post-colonial history of the East Kimberley and Thomas' personal stories and was conceived in the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy in the 1970s. This ceremony was to play a pivotal role in the formation of the East Kimberley art movement. Initially in the early 1980s Thomas was 'apprenticed' and guided in his painting by the senior men at Warmun: Paddy Jaminji, George Mung Mung, and Jacko Dolmo. He did not paint the boards of the balga, but he directed the content and style. Thomas was distinctive in being a man with many 'countries' and he was able to depict the 'country' around Warmun, not just because of the unique position of being the creator to the Kurrirr Kurrirr, but because he was an initiated man, married to a Gija woman, Rita Tinmarie. The landscape became an allegory for personal experiences, historical events and ancestral dramas in his paintings. Thomas moved across the wide terrain of the East Kimberley, drawing together different places aligned to his father's and mother's ancestry, presenting places, stories, topographical features in the a simultaneous aerial and profile perspective with broad areas of colour enclosed by dotted outlining. Throughout his career he used a very restricted palette preferring black, white, red and yellow ochres and pigments only fleetingly experimenting with other colours. One reason for Thomas' remarkable reception into the art arena was that they dovetailed neatly into the 'minimalist' modernist concepts of art which were predominate during the 1980s. He was famously reported to say, when viewing Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko's works at the National Gallery of Australia, "That bugger paints like me!" This painting, Untitled 1996, draws on a period of Thomas' life when he returned, for the first time, to his birth place, Yalda Soak near Well 33 in the Great Sandy Desert in 1995. There is a return to a more 'desert' viewpoint to his work from this time - the almost exclusive use of the aerial perspective, the use of the 'circle' and the subject matter: ancestral stories relating to this area. These desert conventions appear more dominantly in Thomas' paintings when he painted his mother's or father's country or stories related to that area. Thomas developed a very individualistic and personal style both in technique and iconography which was deeply rooted in his profound knowledge of traditional pictorial aesthetic conventions of rock painting and ritual ceremony conventions of the East Kimberley. To these he added his own personal trajectory moving across 'county', through a life of transitions to subsume and reinterpret the older traditions which gave us his unique hybrid style. Thomas's paintings are the perspective of an individual Aboriginal man to the world around him. They are replete with innovations in style, form and especially subject matter. Dr Catherine Carr
• Estimate:
  A$50,000 - 70,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.