Emily Kame Kngwareye began painting on canvas in 1988 at the age of 80 and had painted around 3,000 canvases by the time she died aged 86. Herr story is an incredible one; find out about her life and work and reflect in your log on the importance of place and belonging for you in your own work. Can you think of any other artists who use place with such an immersive passion? You might like to reflect on the relationship between painting and drawing in her work.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye is one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. Emily was born at the beginning of the twentieth century and grew up in a remote desert area known as Utopia 230 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, distant from the art world that sought her work.
Although Emily began to paint late in her life she was a prolific artist who often worked at a pace that belied her advanced age. It is estimated that she produced over 3000 paintings in the course of her eight-year painting career — an average of one painting per day.
For virtually two-thirds of her life she had only sporadic contact with the outside world. It was not until she was about 80 that she became, almost overnight, an artist of national and international standing.
Her remarkable work was inspired by her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder, and her lifelong custodians of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.
Whenever Emily was asked to explain her paintings, regardless of whether the images were a shimmering veil of dots, a field of ‘dump dump’ dots, raw stripes seared across the surface or elegant black lines, her answer was always the same:
Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam), Arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), Atnwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot. [1]
Until the success of her painting took off, she had not ventured from her homeland. It was all she had known for her 80 years. The subject matter she painted was all she had ever known and loved, everything from Nature, from the plants and creatures to the land itself. She had never known anything else. There has been much debate over what differentiates a drawing from a painting. I can understand why Kngwareye’s work has been included as reference in a drawing course because it is predominantly made by dots and lines, as opposed to a painting made by using tones and blocks of colour.
There have been many artists over the years whose art was influenced strongly by place. L S Lowry painted scenes of life in industrial districts of the North, in particular Salford and Pendlebury in Lancashire where he lived and worked for over 40 years. Claude Monet painted the water lilies in his garden in Giverny for over 20 years. John Belany attended Edinburgh College of Art in the 60s when Abstract Expressionism was in vogue, however against the advice of his tutors he painted in a figurative style. ‘He wanted his art to focus on the everyday life he knew, especially the fisherfolk and boats from Port Seton, Cockenzie and Eyemouth, the ports on the Firth of Forth where he grew up. It was the heroism of ordinary people that he wanted to celebrate in large, monumental paintings, some of which he displayed on the railings outside this very building on the Mound’.
Another artists who was strongly influenced by place was Scottish Artist Duncan Shanks. I visited an exhibition of his recently and you can access what I wrote about it here;
‘Working in harmony with nature in my notebooks has been an act of faith and an adventure which has taken me to and beyond the poetry of place on a personal odyssey’. (Shanks, 2015: 7).
‘ Duncan Shanks’s sketchbooks provide a distinctive insight into the artist’s changing interpretation of the landscape he has known and loved all his life. They also vividly illustrate his ambition to capture not just space and atmosphere, but the passage of time and life’s transience.’ (Shanks, 2015: 10).
The exhibition described how initially he used the sketches to work into paintings. In addition he used them as a teaching aid for his students at Glasgow School of Art where he taught from 1961 to 1979. When he retired in 1979 to paint full-time his use of sketchbooks increased dramatically; from 8 in the 1970s, to 26 in the 1980s. The exhibition had 106 sketchbooks containing 6500 drawings. ‘This was a direct outcome of his new, full-time commitment to painting and the growing importance of the sketchbooks as visual diaries of his daily thoughts and perambulations which were taking him further from home.’ (Shanks, 2015:12).
‘I have never had to travel far for inspiration. A need for solitude has attracted me to unpeopled places, where man’s intervention is least apparent, the haunts of dippers and goosander by the river, fox in the glen, hare on the hill-top and buzzard and hawk in the clouds above the thorn hedges of the valley.’ (Shanks, 2015:16).
I personally do not yet feel a strong influence of place and belonging. Through necessity I often sketch at home using family and surroundings as subject matter. In several of my courses I have often used the view from my house of a row of traditional cottages across from me, partly because of convenience but also because I like the effects the differing light has on the slate tiled roofs and white washed walls. It is a recurring subject for me, but not an obsession. I am drawn to certain subjects, trees for example, but not from a specific place. Perhaps the difference from my work and the artists I’ve looked at is that I’ve yet to find my own voice. It occurs to me that all of the artists I’ve looked at were driven by a sense of connection and belonging to a place and this has been the driving force behind their passion.
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia_the_genius_of_emily_kame_kngwarreye/emily_kame_kngwarreye
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia_the_genius_of_emily_kame_kngwarreye/emily_kame_kngwarreye
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/exhibitions/john-bellany/the-1960s
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