Iridescence of Colour

On my way to view the Top Arts: VCE 2010 exhibition in the NGV I detoured into the Indigenous Art Collection section of the gallery and was blown away by the work there.  At the moment there is an exhibition titled "Living Water: Contemporary Art of the Far western Desert".  The use of colour was energising and uplifting. It felt so good looking at such glorious art. The little book published to coincide with the exhibition says:

This living art form is a reverberation of iridescent colours, forms, textures and stories, both public and sacred, and of tactile sensations that point up transcendent powers sensed in country.......Far western Desert art is one of increasingly few contemporary art movements unashamedly focused on the practice of painting and the iridescence of colour, and whose most audacious practitioners are women. 'This is the art that, forty years after its eruption into the art world has become the most vibrant, dynamic and living art of the present, [that makes] other forms of painting look weak by comparison. '(Elizabeth Grosz ' Living art and the art of Life)                    -  Judith Ryan Living Water NGV 

 

Ginger Wikilyiri - Tjitji kutjara pitjangu yii - Nyii Ngampuka 2009

Tommy Mitchell Kurlilypurru 2009

Western Desert artists designs issue from their whole body - 'not just from fingers trained to hold a pencil'.  Having viewed the  dancing vibrancy of colour and pattern,  I felt truly joyous, somehow psychologically soothed, calmed and set free.