Sandhills and Bush Apples, 2000 by Barbara Napangarti Reid 122x122cm Cat 8598BR

In her choice of colour Barbara beautifully captures the warmth of the Central Australian desert, whilst her use of closely woven lines broken with such textural use of paint evokes the shimmer of a hot summer’s day.

Titled Tali - Sandhills near Tjukurla, 2000 , this painting represents features of this landscape: puli or rock formations, represented here by the stratified, elongated U shapes: and tali – the waving horizontal lines depicting the sweeping sand dunes. This traditional method of representing geographic formations through the use of stratified lines also has its roots in the body paint worn by women during sacred ceremonies.

The site here is the artist’s custodian site, Tjukurla , in the Gibson Desert, Western Australia.