Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Emily Kame Kngwarreye

humoringthegoddess

Apr 29

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (or Emily Kam Ngwarray) (1910 – 1996) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory of Australia.She is one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of Australian art.Her remarkable work was inspired by her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder, and her lifelong custodianship of the women's Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.Kngwarreye began painting on canvas in her late seventies after decades of ritual artistic activity and batik fabric painting.Unlike most desert painters at the time, Kngwarreye did not use stylized representations of animal tracks or concentric circles in her designs.Instead, she employed richly layered brushstrokes or dabs throughout her abstract compositions.Her free handling of paint using various implements, keen sense of color, and dynamic compositions earned her international fame.It was in Alhalkere that the essence of her being resided, and it was her Dreaming that was the source of the creative power, of her knowledge.So profound was her identification with Alhalkere that it infused her life and her belief system, and governed her kinship relations and connections with other people.More of Emily Kame Kngwarreye's amazing original works can be found at https://www.wikiart.org/en/emily-kame-kngwarreye and https://artguide.com.au/art-plus/emily-kame-kngwarreye/.