My Country, 1996

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

120 x 91 cm

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Provenance: Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Melbourne, Vic, Cat No. AGOD#12160
Artwork story: As a painter Emily was a bold, unselfconscious force unleashing colour and movement onto canvases that at their best could be sublime. Her finest paintings are entirely intuitive works, painted during furious sessions in which she never stepped back to look. Her forceful independent personality coupled with the strength she developed while working with camels and labouring during her earlier life was clearly evident as she painted. She worked as if possessed, drawing long meandering lines and bashing out fields of dots with her exceptionally strong hands and arms, displaying her ability to use the most unlikely overlays of colours to create deeply luminous works. Like Pollock she painted on the ground but, unlike him, she crouched over the canvas until done. She was renowned for walking away from a canvas without even surveying the finished product, such was her assuredness about its content and meaning. By the mid 1990s she employed larger and larger brushes in creating her paintings. With prodigious energy Emily now created wildly colourful canvases by double dipping brushes into pots of layered paint thereby creating floral impressions with alternately coloured variegated outlines. Despite her age, Emily’s physicality was evident as she painted. Often with a brush in each hand she simultaneously pounded them down onto the canvas spreading the bristles and leaving the coagulating paint around the neck of the brush to create depth and form. The runnels of dotted colour across the surfaces of her more abstracted works began to be more formally arranged in parallel lines in her paintings thereafter.

Stockroom

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye

c.1910 – 1996

Region: Eastern Desert
Community: Utopia
Language group: Anmatyerr (Anmatyerre)

My Country, 1996

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

120 x 91 cm

Enquire for price

Provenance: Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Melbourne, Vic, Cat No. AGOD#12160
Artwork story: As a painter Emily was a bold, unselfconscious force unleashing colour and movement onto canvases that at their best could be sublime. Her finest paintings are entirely intuitive works, painted during furious sessions in which she never stepped back to look. Her forceful independent personality coupled with the strength she developed while working with camels and labouring during her earlier life was clearly evident as she painted. She worked as if possessed, drawing long meandering lines and bashing out fields of dots with her exceptionally strong hands and arms, displaying her ability to use the most unlikely overlays of colours to create deeply luminous works. Like Pollock she painted on the ground but, unlike him, she crouched over the canvas until done. She was renowned for walking away from a canvas without even surveying the finished product, such was her assuredness about its content and meaning. By the mid 1990s she employed larger and larger brushes in creating her paintings. With prodigious energy Emily now created wildly colourful canvases by double dipping brushes into pots of layered paint thereby creating floral impressions with alternately coloured variegated outlines. Despite her age, Emily’s physicality was evident as she painted. Often with a brush in each hand she simultaneously pounded them down onto the canvas spreading the bristles and leaving the coagulating paint around the neck of the brush to create depth and form. The runnels of dotted colour across the surfaces of her more abstracted works began to be more formally arranged in parallel lines in her paintings thereafter.