Barney Daniels / Snake and Lizard Dreaming (2A)

Barney Daniels worked in Halls Creek, Western Australia, as a stockman and drover, and commenced painting in the mid 1980’s when he returned to his homelands in the Central Desert. He described himself as self taught. Barney was one of the pioneers of the style of stippled brushwork backgrounds which is evident in most of his paintings and he is included in a number of publications on specialist painting techniques because of this unique approach to Traditional Aboriginal design.

Barney Daniels had a very distinctive style of painting, and made his personal technique of stippled brushwork backgrounds with cleverly depicted iconography memorable and popular, though no other artist has quite attained the subtle and very beautiful results of this method of painting.

He leaves an important body of works to be included with the best of the original desert acrylic artworks.

Selected Exhibitions

1985
• Dot and Circle, a retrospective survey of the Aboriginal acrylic paintings of Central Australia, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne;

1987
• Gauguin Museum, Tahiti

1988
• Centre for Aboriginal Artists, Alice Springs
• Bicentennial Exhibition, touring Australia

1990
• Art Dock, Contemporary Art from Australia, Noumea, New Caledonia

1992
• Tjukurrpa, Museum fur Volkerkunde, Basel

Commissions
• 1988, Australian Bicentennial Authority, produced: My Statement for Living Today

Selected Collections
• Artbank, Sydney
• Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide
• Longbeach Museum, California
• Malcolm Forbes Collection, New York
• The Holmes a Court Collection, Perth

Selected Bibliography
• Isaacs, J., 1989, Aboriginality: Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings and Prints, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland. (C)
• Isaacs, J., 1989, Australian Aboriginal Paintings, Weldon Publishing, NSW
• Johnson, V., 1994, The Dictionary of Western Desert Artists, Craftsman House, East Roseville, NSW (C)
• Maughan, J., and Zimmer, J., (eds), 1986, Dot and Circle, a Retrospective Survey of the Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings of Central Australia, exhib. cat., Communication Services Unit, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne. (C)
• Premont, R., and Lennard, M., 1988, Tjukurrpa, Desert Paintings of Central Australia, Centre for Aboriginal Artists, Alice Springs
• 1993, Aboriginal artist profile – Barney Daniels Tjungurray, State of the Art, 6, 58. (C)