Ngarra: The Texta Drawings

Ngarra: The Texta Drawings

The Texta Drawings serves as an important testimony to an exceptional artist. Additionally, it is a means of honouring and perpetuating Ngarra’s desire to record his extensive knowledge of law, geography and culture for future generations. If it were not for this publication, the valued heritage resource of a unique hunter-gatherer, footwalker of country and stockman would tragically be lost following his passing late in 2008.

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“What a portrait of the artist emerges from these images! Ngarra is by turns prophet, witness, student of nature and conceptualist. In their beguiling way, Shaw's memoir sketch and catalogue notes, buttressed by his other writings and the supporting essays in these pages and elsewhere by Skerritt, Sprague and the contributor of the book's introduction, Nick Tapper, combine to produce a matchless account of a senior traditional Aboriginal man. ”

Nicolas Rothwell

The Australian

“A rewarding read, Ngarra the texta drawings tells a story of an individual who was determined to carve a significant and unique life out of a period of volatile change for Indigenous Australians. Ngarra's success resulted in an opening of new worlds and audiences to him, as he commented to Shaw about the vast difference between the "big city exhibitions" where the really proper sensible people want to know all about really bush blackfella like a me and his life as a 'lonely bush blackfella'.”

Lucy Stranger

Artist Profile

Shane Pickett Meeyakba

Shane Pickett Meeyakba

The paintings of Shane Pickett show the transformations of Nyoongar country, the country of Australia's SouthWest, in breathtaking and ever-changing images.

Shane Pickett (1957 - 2010) grew up on a small Aboriginal mission in the Wheatbelt agricultural region east of Perth. From an early age Pickett suffered from ill health, but showed an immediate aptitude for drawing and painting. He held his first exhibition in Perth in 1976, at the age of 19.

Over a three-decade career, Pickett's work transformed from detailed landscape paintings reminiscent of Albert Namatjira into a groundbreaking and expressive form of gestural abstraction. He developed a new visual language to represent the cornerstones of Nyoongar culture: the pathways of ancestors, traditional healing practices and places, and especially the six Nyoongar seasons. He would sometimes describe his paintings as windows into the Dreaming, and the strength of his culture is delivered all through his work with brilliant, lyrical intensity. Exploring not only physical healing but also healing of environmental destruction and the wounds of colonisation, his paintings show the persistence of Nyoongar ways of seeing the country.

His Nyoongar name, Meeyakba, or "soft light of the moon", captures the gentle spirit of an artist who set a beacon for those who follow him. He is remembered as the preeminent Nyoongar artist of his time and one of the great painters of the Western Australian landscape.

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“In one sense, Pickett's late painting was the very definition of abstract art, working from the superficial, visible elements of the landscape towards more elemental ones ( the sky, waterholes, medicine grounds, the moon).”

Nick Tapper

Editor

“...as we look at works such as Through the Window of Dreaming or Travel Lines Across the Hunting Grounds and Waterways, we feel few other artists could have so powerfully articulated a modern, often painful visions withing the context of a vital tradition as Pickett. History is one thing, memory another. ”

Will Yeoman

Weekend West

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