VINCENT NAMATJIRA OAM
It takes a lot of paperwork, a light plane and a long four-wheel drive to find artist Vincent Namatjira at Indulkana in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the remote north-west of South Australia. But once there, the content and colours of the artist’s canvas make high-chroma sense. The red dirt, the dry creek beds, an impossibly blue sky, the creep of global branding, the optimistic vitality of the community and its cast of cartoon-like characters all flesh out with a dynamism that funnels straight into Iwantja Arts.
Naming after a nearby creek that is the establishing source of the community and the Dreaming site of the Tjurki (Owl), this art centre — one of 10 Indigenousowned
and -governed arts enterprises that make up the APY Art Centre Collective — is the pulsing hub to which Namatjira plots his passage every morning. Within its lo-fi, laughter-filled sanctum, he renders the faces of past and present, brushstroking with a parodist’s wit and a want to “strip away their power”.
Namatjira mashes politics and pop culture with the hyper-localised concerns of remote life and a good laugh. “My friend Tony Albert recently called this tactic ‘guerrilla humour’, which I like,” he says. “If you can make them laugh, then hopefully you can get them to pay attention and think about the serious side, too.”
Such fantastical and figurative departure from the usual dot abstractions of desert style begs the ‘why?’
“My father-in-law, Kunmanara (Jimmy) Pompey was an artist at Iwantja Arts, one of the important old tjilpi [senior men] here,” explains Namatjira. “Unlike most of the old fellas, who are dot-painters, he was a figurative painter, [drawing] from his ››