Darby Jampijinpa Ross, 1905-2005, NGAPA JUKURRPA (WATER DREAMING)

• Lot Sold $6,500 (Hammer Price)
• $7,800 (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
bears artist's name, title and Warlukurlangu Artists catalogue number 10/89 on the reverse  
76 BY 121CM  
Provenance: 
Painted at Yuendumu in 1989 
Warlukurlangu Artists, Yuendumu 
Donald Kahn Collection  

Exhibited: 
Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Donald Kahn, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Florida, 1991; Carolino Augusteum Museum, Salzburg, The Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Naprstkovo Museum, Prague and The Museum of Ethnology, Warsaw during 1992-1993 
Dreamings - Tjukurrpa: Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, The Donald Kahn Collection, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 26 July-16 October 1994 
Australian Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert- The Donald Kahn Collection, Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh, 3 December 1994-28 January 1995 
Desert Dreaming: Australian Aboriginal Art, Albertina, Vienna, 15 June - 26 August 2007 

Literature:
Geoffrey Bardon and Vivien Johnson, Australian Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Donald Kahn, Miami: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, 1991, p.54, cat.no.23 (iIlus.), p.78 
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker (ed.), Dreamings - Tjukurrpa: Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, The Donald Kahn Collection, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1994, p.40, cat.no.23 (black and white illus.), pp.116-117 (illus.)

Cf. Rain/Water Dreaming, 1989, in R. Crumlin and A. Knight, Aboriginal Art and Spirituality, Melbourne: Dove Publications,1995, pp.66-67, pl. 36; see also a detail (‘Ngapa Jukurrpa') of the large collaborative canvas Karrku, in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, University of Virginia, USA, in H. Morphy and M. Smith Boles (eds.), Art from the Land: Dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe collection of Australian Aboriginal art, Charlottesville:University of Virginia, 1999, p.200, pl.7.5
 
Darby Ross was one of the eminent elders of the Warlpiri people, who, over the long course of his life witnessed the arrival of Europeans on Warlpiri territories early last century and the dramatic changes to traditional life that ensued. He was a survivor of the infamous Coniston massacre of 1928 when well over one hundred Warlpiri and Anmatyerre were killed. A great ceremonial leader and artist, a keeper of Warlpiri law and traditions, and an influential teacher, the charismatic Darby Ross was a major force behind the public painting movement at Yuendumu that developed during the 1980s. For Ross, painting for a wider public was important to preserve and promote Warlpiri culture.
 
The subject of this painting, Ngapa (Water) is one of the epic ancestral narratives of the Warlpiri that connects various kin groups. It is one of the Warlpiri foundation chronicles. This animated painting features waters inundating the desert landscape during heavy rains, emanating from a waterhole represented by the roundel in the picture. The painterly exuberance of this composition bears comparison to a rarely seen early work by Ross, drawn in crayons on paper in the 1960s, Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming), and to Ngapa manu Yankirri Jukurrpa (Water and Emu Dreaming), 1989, in Liam Campbell, Darby: One hundred years of life in a changing culture, Sydney: ABC Books and Warlpiri Media, Yuendumu, 2006, pp.61 and 62 respectively, (illus.).
 
This painting is sold with an accompanying Warlukurlangu Artists certificate