Boxer Milner born 1935

Painted at Bililuna in 1999
Warlayirti Artists, Wirramanu (Balgo Hills), Western Australia, catalogue number 597/99
Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Melbourne

Aborigena: Arte australiana contemporanea, Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, 29 June-26 August 2001
Desert Art, Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 23 February - 23 June 2002
Mythology and Reality, Contemporary Aboriginal Desert Art from the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts, Jerusalem, Israel, 21 October – 19 December 2003
Mythology & Reality, Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Desert Art From the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2 October 2004 - 30 January 2005

Achille Bonito Olivia, Aborigena, Arte Australiana Contemporanea, Torino, Palazzo Bricherasio, Electa, Milano 2001, p.78, pl.71
Achille Bonito Olivia, Desert Art, Electa, Milano, 2002, p.78, pl.71
Achille Bonito Olivia and Gabrielle Pizzi, Mythology and Reality, Contemporary Aboriginal Desert Art from the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, The Jerusalem Centre for the Performing Arts, Jerusalem, Israel, 21 October – 19 December 2003, p.21, illus.
Geoffrey Bardon, Judith Ryan, Gabrielle Pizzi, Zara Stanhope, Contemporary Aboriginal Desert Art From the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Mythology & Reality, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p.21, illus.

Cf. Cubillo, F. and W. Caruana (eds.), Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection highlights, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2010, p.77; also, John Carty, ‘Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Portraits of Water’ in Henry F. Skerritt, (ed.), No Boundaries, Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting From The Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, DelMonico Books, Prestel, Munich-London-New York, 2014, pp.118-131 for an extensive discussion of the artist and illustrations of related works.

Unframed. No repairs or restoration. A small dot of brown substance, possibly vegetable matter, on one of the dots about 10cm to the left of the central strut and 10cm from the top of the painting. Appears in very good condition overall.
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Anthropologist John Carty reflects, “Words like abstraction, landscape or representation fall short of these paintings. When I first met Boxer and first encountered the pointillist geometries of his paintings, I mistakenly thought him to be among the most abstract of desert painters. He clearly practiced abstraction. However, looking back at his oeuvre now, it is clear that like any great artist, he was exploring something far more interesting than abstraction itself.

 

Boxer Milner painted the rains, the rainbow, the river in flood, the river subsiding, drying out, and the land around it transformed by water. He painted the soils, the grasses, and flowers. He painted his beloved tinyjil trees (Eucalyptus brevifolia). He painted the place he was born, the paths he walked with his mother. He lived his entire life here, and the river connected everything. It was the spine of his meaning and memory. From this perspective his painted Country, as a connected body of work, coalesces into an ecological portrait of Sturt Creek. It is an expansive, borderless portrait with Boxer himself figured (or abstracted) squarely at its core.

 

It is a portrait that includes the ancestral beings whose actions created the Country, and a portrait of the places where men re-create those actions in ceremony today. It is a portrait of water, of its power to transform the land and the changing features of the Country as the water dries up. These shapes exist in the land, and in the mind, and in the space between the two. The forms in Boxer’s paintings are the relationship between tradition and innovation, between memory and landscape, between self and world. He turned his own knowledge of the river, his rights over it, and his feelings for it, into the subject of his paintings: the icon to be animated by dots. In doing so Boxer was re-enacting, rather than representing, the creative processes that left these shapes in the land. In his art, the creative forces of nature, the creative arts of the ancestors and the creative marks of the artist are refractions of each other.” (ibid. pp.122-3)