Kame Colour 1996

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (c1910-1996)

Ammatyerre language group
Kame Colour 1996

synthetic polymer paint on linen
152.5 x 91.5 cm

Provenance:
Delmore Gallery, Northern Territory
William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (gallery stamp verso on stretcher bar and canvas)
Applied Chemicals Collection, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited:
Of My Country: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, The Applied Chemicals Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo 1 - 30 May 1999, and touring various venues throughout Victoria and New South Wales, June 1999 - April 2000

Estimate: $90000 - 110000

This magnificent painting was created just before Emily Kngwarreye’s health deteriorated two months prior to her death. It is therefore one of the last created during her wildest period of self-expression - the twelve months between July 1995 and July 1996. Everything she had learnt as a painter was distilled in the confident physically gestural works of this period. The works are characterised by entangled brushstrokes, sometimes almost translucent and at other times thick and textural. The circular sweeping movements mark the limits of her reach as the canvas was turned and turned and turned again until completely filled. The composition is symphonic as colour chords collide and entangle.

Janet Holt, for whom she painted more than any other, has described Emily’s approach to painting during this period as:

…struggling to scramble her sweeping marks into the central void in a final attempt to obliterate […] the unforgiving absence of colour and light, the unfigurable signs of the disappearance of the body.1

Emily referred to this penultimate series of works as ‘sacred’ grasses. This referred to the wild grasses that are cut and winnowed in the wind to release their seed for making edible cakes. Margo Neale, the curator of the artist’s retrospective exhibition in Japan has said that these paintings:

transcend literal meaning and allude to the concept of ‘whole lot’ that Emily repeatedly referred to in her all encompassing statement.  ‘that’s what I paint, whole lot’.2

These action paintings are truly wondrous given the artist was 86 years of age. They reveal an artist who is completely at ease with her materials. In Kame Colour 1996 the mark-making demonstrates the bold assurance and confidence of an artist who has produced more than three thousand canvases in only eight years. This is Emily at her zenith. 

Her health suddenly declined thereafter. Within a week or two she fell ill - in six weeks she was dead. Her final series of forty paintings were created by employing wide brushes used for house-painting. In less than ten strokes, sometimes as few as four, large blocks of vibrant electric colour, were laid down by an artist whose power was finally ebbing as she prepared to return to the spiritual source of her Dreaming.

Footnotes

1. Isaacs. J., Smith. T., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p37-38

2. ibid

©Adrian Newstead