Walter Jangala Brown / Tingari Cycle (6827-22)

Artwork is accompanied by Warlukurlangu Artists (Yuendumu) Art Centre Certificate of Authenticity/Provenance

Walter Jangala Brown was born in 1977 in Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal community 290 km north-west of Alice Springs in the NT of Australia. He comes from a long line of artists including Pintupi artist Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, a highly acclaimed painter and founder of the Papunya Tula Artists group. Walter went to Yirara College, an Aboriginal boarding college in Alice Springs. When he finished school, he worked for the Shire for 2 or 3 years. He now lives in Nyirripi and is married to Valerie. They have three children.

He began painting for Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, an Aboriginal owned and governed art centre located in Yuendumu in 2007. He paints his father’s Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming); Warna Jukurrpa (Snake Dreaming); and Yumari Jukurrpa (a collection of rocks located to the west of Kintore in the Gibson Desert). He also paints his grandfather’s Tingari Cycle. These dreamings relate directly to his land, its features and the plants and animals that inhabit it.

When Walter is not working or painting he plays football and goes hunting.

The painting depicts a portion of the Tingari cycle, a very important collection of Dreaming narratives from the Western Desert region. The country in this painting is located far to the west of Yuendumu and spans the vast area across the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts. The cycle tells the story of a group of ancient creation ancestors known as the Tingari, who travelled across the country. The Tingari took different forms, some human and some animal. As the Tingari travelled over vast areas of country, they held initiations and other ceremonies, caused and encountered raging bushfires, hunted game and fought and killed one and another and brought them back to life. In the course of these adventures, they either created or became the physical features of the sites they visited, forming rocky outcrops, waterholes, trees, salt lakes and so on.