Larrjibarrny - Horse Creek, 2003

natural earth pigments on canvas

90 x 120 cm

$6,500

Artwork story: This painting is about Ngagoorroon Country... Ngagoorroon at Texas... down Horse Creek way. Hector learned to work with stock there and grew up with his old people. He learned how to ride, and walked the Country. By the time this work was painted, Hector Jandany was a senior elder and the oldest of the Warmun artists, at Turkey Creek. His family history had been littered with harrowing tales of persecution. Gadiya (white people) shot his grandfather and harmed his grandmother, who subsequently died in childbirth, and while Hector was still in infancy, his father had also died in a confrontation with white people. Though his mother remarried a stockman, whom Hector admired, it was his mother’s country, the Bungle Bungles (Purnululu), that became the primary source of his artistic inspiration when he took up painting late in his life. Hector’s decision to become an artist sprang indirectly from his work with the Bough Shed School, which opened in 1979 at Warmun, and of which Hector became the director. It was here that he encouraged two-way learning, maintaining a firm belief in his instinctive knowledge of the country whist having adopted a strong Christian belief. Hector began painting with the establishment of the Waringarri Aboriginal Arts in Kununurra in the late 1980s and continued a decade later after the Warmun Arts Centre began operating out of the old post-office building at Turkey Creek, the community in which he was born. Here he would sit, an inspiration and delight to anyone who found the time to just sit and enjoy his company and humour. He would build the surface of his canvass slowly and carefully by applying soft earth colours, pink, greens, greys and later introducing warm browns, reds and blacks. He gained renown for quirky figurative depictions and irregular hill formations rendered with an innate sense of spacial geometry. He treated the surface of his work as if it were sacred, touching and rubbing his hand gently across it reverently. Watching him use a stone to rub, sand and smooth the thin washes of softly coloured earth pigment that had been mixed from rocks gathered and carefully ground in the surrounding environment, made one feel as if he believed the painting to be the country itself. Though Hector Jandanay played second fiddle to many of the brightest stars of the Warmun movement, the eccentricity of his compositions, their variety and sensitivity, make his works of art particularly memorable and interesting. Over two decades he produced a steady and consistent body of significant works. He lived to become the last of the grand old pioneers of the painting movement at Warmun. While his fame may never match that of his more successful contemporaries such as Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas, once discovered, many collectors are likely to find his works a more than adequate substitute. Indeed, those with an eye for the unique and eccentric may find that, here in Hector, lies something even more appetising.

Stockroom

Click to enlarge

Hector Jandanay

c.1929 – 2006

Region: Kimberley
Community: Warmun (Turkey Creek)
Language group: Gija (Kija, Gidja, Kitja, Kidja)

Larrjibarrny - Horse Creek, 2003

natural earth pigments on canvas

90 x 120 cm

$6,500

Artwork story: This painting is about Ngagoorroon Country... Ngagoorroon at Texas... down Horse Creek way. Hector learned to work with stock there and grew up with his old people. He learned how to ride, and walked the Country. By the time this work was painted, Hector Jandany was a senior elder and the oldest of the Warmun artists, at Turkey Creek. His family history had been littered with harrowing tales of persecution. Gadiya (white people) shot his grandfather and harmed his grandmother, who subsequently died in childbirth, and while Hector was still in infancy, his father had also died in a confrontation with white people. Though his mother remarried a stockman, whom Hector admired, it was his mother’s country, the Bungle Bungles (Purnululu), that became the primary source of his artistic inspiration when he took up painting late in his life. Hector’s decision to become an artist sprang indirectly from his work with the Bough Shed School, which opened in 1979 at Warmun, and of which Hector became the director. It was here that he encouraged two-way learning, maintaining a firm belief in his instinctive knowledge of the country whist having adopted a strong Christian belief. Hector began painting with the establishment of the Waringarri Aboriginal Arts in Kununurra in the late 1980s and continued a decade later after the Warmun Arts Centre began operating out of the old post-office building at Turkey Creek, the community in which he was born. Here he would sit, an inspiration and delight to anyone who found the time to just sit and enjoy his company and humour. He would build the surface of his canvass slowly and carefully by applying soft earth colours, pink, greens, greys and later introducing warm browns, reds and blacks. He gained renown for quirky figurative depictions and irregular hill formations rendered with an innate sense of spacial geometry. He treated the surface of his work as if it were sacred, touching and rubbing his hand gently across it reverently. Watching him use a stone to rub, sand and smooth the thin washes of softly coloured earth pigment that had been mixed from rocks gathered and carefully ground in the surrounding environment, made one feel as if he believed the painting to be the country itself. Though Hector Jandanay played second fiddle to many of the brightest stars of the Warmun movement, the eccentricity of his compositions, their variety and sensitivity, make his works of art particularly memorable and interesting. Over two decades he produced a steady and consistent body of significant works. He lived to become the last of the grand old pioneers of the painting movement at Warmun. While his fame may never match that of his more successful contemporaries such as Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas, once discovered, many collectors are likely to find his works a more than adequate substitute. Indeed, those with an eye for the unique and eccentric may find that, here in Hector, lies something even more appetising.