OTTO PAREROULTJA

Private collection, Melbourne

The work is in very good condition. There is a small water mark in the top righjt hand corner, as visible in the image reproduction. This most likely was caused by the hand of the artist at the time of painting.
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Cf. Tribal concept - Aranda country, before 1970 in Morphy, H., Aboriginal Art, Phaidon, London, 1998, p.278, plate 185; The hills behind Hermannsburg, c.1954, and Untitled landscape, c.1950s, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Perkins, H., Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004, pp.116-17, illus.

The painting bears all the hallmarks of Otto Pareroultja's distinctive hand, the landscape is transformed into a pulsating organic mass of colour and shape. While following the conventions set down by the pioneer of the Hermannsburg school of watercolour painting, his kinsman Albert Namatjira, Otto's vision was unique.

The snow gum on the left, situated in the very foreground of the picture plane, its canopy and base cut off at the edges of the work, creates the sense of space to the hills beyond. The linguist T.G.H. Strehlow singled out Pareroultja's depiction of ghost gums as being '... in close harmony with Ancient Aranda ... tales, according to which many of these old gums had arisen from poles abandoned on their travels by their original totemic ancestors.' Strehlow went on to comment that Pareroultja's watercolours conveyed '... the same kind of distinctive Aranda feeling for balance, love of repetition and design, and sure sense of rhythm, that give such glorious vitality to their best verse ...' (Tunnicliffe, W., 'Otto Pareroutlja' in Perkins, 2004, p.116)