Texas Downs, 1992

natural earth pigments on canvas

100 x 114 cm

Est. $3,500 – $4,500

Hammer $3,800

Provenance: Purchased from the Warmun Road House, Turkey Creek, WA, 1992 Private Collection, Vic
Artwork story: Texas Downs Station sits in the undulating hill country of the East Kimberley, on Gija ancestral Country that has been the central subject of Warmun painters since Paddy Jaminji and Rover Thomas established the movement's visual language in the late 1970s. By 1992, when this work was painted, the Warmun school was entering its period of international recognition, and the rendering of this landscape, its distinctive ranges, its open savanna ground, its deeply coloured rock country, had become one of the defining tasks of Gija art. Texas Downs maps that Country with the bold economy characteristic of the Warmun tradition. A warm amber-gold ground fills the upper and middle registers. Across the centre, a great undulating band of dark charcoal-grey rises in three rounded peaks, the ranges rendered without shadow or recession, as a Gija person knows them. Each boundary between form and ground is traced in a fine line of white dot-work, the visual signature of the school. At the lower edge, three deep burgundy forms push upward, a second tier of rock country, the colour of ironstone in afternoon light.

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Sale 3 · Lot 108

Ruby Nalgil

natural earth pigments on canvas

100 x 114 cm

Est. $3,500 – $4,500

Hammer $3,800

Provenance: Purchased from the Warmun Road House, Turkey Creek, WA, 1992 Private Collection, Vic
Artwork story: Texas Downs Station sits in the undulating hill country of the East Kimberley, on Gija ancestral Country that has been the central subject of Warmun painters since Paddy Jaminji and Rover Thomas established the movement's visual language in the late 1970s. By 1992, when this work was painted, the Warmun school was entering its period of international recognition, and the rendering of this landscape, its distinctive ranges, its open savanna ground, its deeply coloured rock country, had become one of the defining tasks of Gija art. Texas Downs maps that Country with the bold economy characteristic of the Warmun tradition. A warm amber-gold ground fills the upper and middle registers. Across the centre, a great undulating band of dark charcoal-grey rises in three rounded peaks, the ranges rendered without shadow or recession, as a Gija person knows them. Each boundary between form and ground is traced in a fine line of white dot-work, the visual signature of the school. At the lower edge, three deep burgundy forms push upward, a second tier of rock country, the colour of ironstone in afternoon light.