Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Purchased from Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia in April 2000
  The Laverty Collection, Sydney
  
  LITERATURE:
  Linda Michael (ed.), Paddy Bedford, exh. cat., Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006, p.143 (illus.)
  
  Untitled (Old Bedford), 1998, is the fifth painting
  catalogued in the first year Nyunkuny commenced
  painting in the public arena through Jirrawun Arts.
  The title of the work refers to the original building
  constructed of Spinifex and paperbark, on Bedford
  Station, south of the present homestead. It is country
  that belongs to Nyunkuny's uncles and aunts and
  known by the Gija name Doowoonan. The painting
  on hardboard reflects the influence of Rover Thomas,
  who passed away in the same year this was created: the
  physical and visual tactility of the natural ochres, the
  articulation of forms defined by lines of white dotting
  which appear to float across the canvas yet are firmly
  anchored in place by the composition, are elements
  reminiscent of Thomas' work.
  
  Wally Caruana
  
  PADDY BEDFORD
  Paddy Bedford (Nyunkuny) was born into a 'world
  of violence' (Langton, M., 'Goowoomji's World' in
  Michael, L. (ed.), Paddy Bedford, Sydney: Museum of
  Contemporary Art, 2006, p.53), at Ngarrmaliny on
  Bedford Downs cattle station in the eastern Kimberley,
  where a number of his Gija relatives were massacred
  for killing a bullock near Kananganja (Mount King) a
  few years previously. Nonetheless he grew up to lead an
  active ceremonial life while working as a stockman on
  Bedford, old Greenvale and Bow River Stations. Paddy
  Bedford began to paint for the public in his seventies
  when he joined Freddie Timms as a founding member
  of the Jirrawun Arts collective, established in 1998 to
  protect the rights of a group of east Kimberley artists.
  He was no overnight success; Nyunkuny's mastery of
  painting on canvas owed much to years of ritual activity,
  and he was soon hailed as the 'new Rover Thomas'
  (Koford, F., in Kleinert, S. and M. Neal (eds), The Oxford
  Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford
  University Press, 2000, p.540).
  
  Paddy Bedford participated in several major exhibitions,
  including the seminal Blood on the Spinifex exhibition
  at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of
  Melbourne, in 2002-3, about the violent times suffered
  by previous generations of Gija, and True Stories: Art of
  the East Kimberley at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
  in 2003. He was selected as one of eight Aboriginal
  artists to contribute designs for the buildings of the
  Musée du quai Branly, Paris, that opened in 2006.
  Later that year he was honoured with a retrospective
  exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In
  2012 his work was included in Ancestral Modern: Australian
  Aboriginal Art: Kaplan & Levi Collection, at the Seattle Art
  Museum, USA.
  
  Wally Caruana

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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