Charlie Numbulmore circa 1907-1971

Found at Mowanjum, Kimberley, Western Australia, after the artist had died, 1973
Kim Akerman Collection
Mary Macha, Perth, Western Australia
The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

Kim Akerman, Wanjina - Notes on some Iconic Ancestral Beings of the Northern Kimberley, http://www.kimberleyfoundation.org.au/akerman-2014/p.61 illus.

Painted on an old piece of broken Masonite board with some evidence of old insect damage to the rear (prior to the image being painted). The painting has several areas of pigment loss, especially around the perimeter; all pigment losses are visible in the catalogue illustration. Remaining pigment on the image appears stable.
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Painted in about 1970, possibly at the time Helen Groger-Wurm was commissioning paintings from Numbulmore, this painting had been lost behind a cupboard in the small room that served as a craft centre at the ‘old’ Mowanjum community. It was found in 1973 when the centre was moved to a new location in the community. Numbulmore was known to have re-painted Wanjina figures at the rock shelter at Mamadayi and David Mowaljarli believed this figure to represent the same Wanjina.

Numbulmore’s Wanjina paintings are generally readily identifiable. Those that represent the head and shoulders only are usually solid white figures (invariably derived from the mineral huntite) with details added in red, black and yellow. In the centre of the chest a solid (usually black, but occasionally red) oval form is said to depict the sternum, heart or a pearl shell pendant. The almost circular heads are surrounded by a very regular halo that represents a headdress (and hair, clouds and/or lightning). The large, round, black eyes fringed with short, delicate lashes usually occupy a greater proportion of the head in Numbulmore’s Wanjinas than in those painted by other artists. Similarly, his Wanjinas have well defined, long narrow parallel-sided noses, flared at the very tip, with the nostrils invariably depicted.

In the final creative burst before his death, Numbulmore began to give his Wanjina figures mouths and sometimes bodies, rather than portray only the head and shoulders. Since his death in 1971, just eleven paintings of Wanjina on bark and board by Numbulmore have appeared on the secondary market at auction, and it is significant to note that in only two of these paintings, Wanjina have been depicted without mouths.

KA