Rover Thomas | 'Kuka Banyu, 1996' | 120x165cm

Code: KA00343

Artist: Rover Thomas

Title: Kuka Banyu

Area: East Kimberley, WA

Community: Kukatja / Wangkajunga

Medium: Natural Ochres And Pigments On Canvas

Size: 120x165cm

Year: 1996

Rover Thomas's country paintings emerged from the Krill Krill ceremony, the song cycle he received in visions after the death of a kinswoman and the destruction wrought by Cyclone Tracy. Out of that revelation came a new way of picturing the East Kimberley: hills, rivers, waterholes and named sites rendered as flat planes of ochre, seen as if from above and bounded by dotted lines. Titles like Kuka Banyu point to the food and water sources of that country, the animal and the water that sustain it, carried in memory from a lifetime spent working the stations and walking the land around Warmun.

Rover Thomas Joolama is the founding figure of East Kimberley painting and one of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century. Born around 1926 at Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route, he moved north as a young man and worked for decades as a stockman across Kimberley cattle stations before settling at Warmun. In 1975, following the death of a classificatory mother in a car accident and the devastation of Cyclone Tracy, he received a series of Dreaming visions that generated the Krill Krill ceremony, a song and dance cycle performed with painted boards carried on the dancers' shoulders. Thomas initially directed the making of these boards and from around 1980 began painting himself. His mature work is austere and monumental: broad planes of red, ochre, black and white natural pigment, bounded by lines of dots, reading simultaneously as aerial map, body of country and abstract composition. He painted both ancestral narrative and recent history, including colonial massacre sites. In 1990 he became, with Trevor Nickolls, the first Aboriginal artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, and in 1994 the National Gallery of Australia mounted his survey Roads Cross.