Black and White Aboriginal Art

Many Aboriginal artists have created a distinctive sense of their own style by using a restricted palette in their black and white Aboriginal art. A brief look at the approaches of several artists highlights how they have used the contrast and design qualities created through black and white to strengthen their message.

The black and white Aboriginal art format is successfully used by Mt Liebig artist Lily Kelly Napangardi to create a feeling of the vast sandhill terrain that dominates her desert homelands. By varying the intensity and tone of the white dotting on a black background, Lily Kelly achieves a sense of a grand, shifting landscape that has a sense of mystery attached to it.

Anna Petyarre, who draws on the landscapes around Boundary Bore on the Utopia homelands, uses finely dotted black and white linear designs to create her country. The structures, like those of Lily Kelly, suggest the effects of wind and water on the desert landscape. Long lines of sandhills with meandering watercourses are revealed as structures of great importance to Anna’s ancestral stories.

Eva Nelson Napaltjarri uses intricate black and white dotting in her paintings of the Ngadajirri or Budgerigar Dreaming story from Mt Dennison, in Central Australia. She creates the contours and waterholes of the site where the Budgerigars flock at nesting time. The fine contrasts of the black and white treatment suggest both the minute detail and scale of the birds’ environment.

Veteran desert artist Ronnie Tjampitjinpa uses a bold linear style to create the symbols associated with Water Dreaming and the Tingari stories from Pintupi country. By reducing the forms to black and white Ronnie starkly maps out the designs as they have been created since ancient times as sand paintings or incised designs on artefacts or rock surfaces. While the Aboriginal artists’ approaches in this collection vary greatly, all manage to achieve a distinctive quality by using the limited contrast found in black and white.

View more artworks at Japingka:
Gloria Petyarre
Kerry Madawyn McCarthy
Ronnie Tjampitjinpa
Margaret Lewis Napangardi
Mitjili Napurrula
Colours of the Earth
Dorothy Napangardi & Kim West Napurrula

More about Aboriginal art at the National Gallery of Australia