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Lift livAJohnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula es

Obituary

31 March 2001 - A troubled life that produced Aboriginal art quite untouched by European conventions

In 1931, when Johnny Tjupurrula was aged six, an aeroplane landed on his family territory. The boy’s parents had never seen a white person and were convinced that the plane was an instrument of evil and the pilot a Mamu, or devil. In terror, the entire tribe — consisting perhaps of 30 people — hid in the trees until the plane departed.

Tjupurrula’s birthplace was Minjilpiri, on the southern shore of Lake Mackay in Aus- tralia’s Northern Territory. Sixty years later Tjupurrula was widely acclaimed as one of Australia’s finest artists. In 1999 his monumental Waterdreaming at Kalipinya (1972) sold for A$486,500 at Sotheby’s — a record for a painting by an indigenous Australian.

Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula received no European education in his desert homeland, and when he was old enough to earn money the family moved east to the Her- mannsburg mission. For 30 years he worked as a labourer, felling trees and building roads and airstrips. “All I got was my tucker,” (food, provisions and tobacco), he later told a London journalist.

He was a personable and articulate young man, and in 1954 he and his his brother, Nosepeg Tjupurrula, were chosen to represent his people to the Queen. Throughout the 1950s federal government policy was to remove indigenous people from remote areas to new townships. From 1960 Tjupurrula lived with 1,400 desert Aborigines in a new settlement, Papunya, 200 miles southwest of Alice Springs.

The arrival in 1970 of the remarkable art teacher Geoffrey Bardon changed the lives of many members of this community and in particular that of Tjupurrula. “He was a village councillor when I first met him,” Bardon recalls, “and forward in his dealings with white people; a happy, expressive man and a tireless worker.” Bardon supplied his students with materials for painting, but Tjupurrula, who had only two fingers on one of his hands, had difficulty using a brush and instead developed a unique treatment involving dotting and over-dotting. Unlike the paintings of Clifford Possum, Tjupurrula’s are strictly Aboriginal without conscious European influence. Geoffrey Bardon has written: “He uses calligraphic line with an almost Baroque excitement, convoluted spiral symbols for people and animal tracks, and distorted figures as illustrations of ceremony.”

Tjupurrula’s work was collected by the Holmes à Court Foundation, the Australian National Gallery and all the state galleries. But from about 1990 his health deteriorated and the quality of his work suffered. The money he had earnt had all been spent in support of an extended family. He drank too much and police removed him from a shanty in a dry riverbed.

Perhaps the nadir of his physical and psychic dissolution came with his rejection by a group of his own people. It is impossible for a non-indigenous person to know why, but his arms were broken in mysterious circumstances. Unscrupulous dealers took advantage of his poverty, and paid him a small fraction of what his work was worth. Eventually he was reduced to begging for food, clothes and blankets. Part of the trouble was that he lived in Alice Springs — something of a no man’s land for a desert Aboriginal.

Two years before his death, his daughter Nagali returned him to Papunya. He developed the strength to control his drinking. He rose at sunrise. “I paint in the morning, have a drink in the afternoon.” He achieved a kind of personal renaissance. Despite cataracts, he produced fine work which sold well and from which he received a fair remuneration. “A life that seemed destined to end in tragedy and despair now appears likely to be remembered as one of triumph,” wrote his friend Glenn Mitchell in 1988.

The tribulations of Johnny Tjupurrula mirrored, in many ways, those of his people. Yet his creativity was manifest for much of his life. He is survived by his wife Gladys Napanangka (also an artist), eight children and a tribal family of about 30 people.

Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula, Aboriginal artist, was born around 1925. He died on February 11, 2001.

This article is from The Times

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