Jarinyanu Dancing at Broome Festival

Jarinyanu David Downs (c. 1925–1995), Wangkajunga/Walmajarri painter, printmaker and preacher, lived a traditional life in the Great Sandy Desert of West Australia until he was a young man. Moving to the Northern Territory in the late 1940s, he worked as a drover and miner, before relocating to Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia. He converted to Baptist Christianity in the mid-1960s, and became a church elder. Shortly after this he began to make shields, boomerangs and coolamons decorated with ochre; he started to paint figuratively on paper, shields and canvas in the early 1980s. Many of his paintings include Christian imagery, and some combine his traditional stories and personal experiences with Baptist stories; his body of work expresses his philosophy that we 'gotta make 'em whole lot one family'. The exhibition Jarinyanu David Downs, Kurtal as Self, held in the artist's community of Fitzroy Crossing in 2016, was the first show of his works since his death in 1995.

This 1990 self-portrait was among the works in the 2016 exhibition. Karen Dayman's essay in the exhibition catalogue states that in this painting, Jarinyanu has depicted himself painted for a ceremony honouring Kurtal the Rainmaker and celebrating the connection between the rain and the replenishment of the land and of food sources that it creates.

Purchased 2017
© Jarinyanu David Downs/Copyright Agency, 2024

Audio description

Show transcript

Jarinyanu David Downs painted himself, Jarinyanu Dancing at Broome Festival, in 1990. He used natural earth pigments and synthetic polymer paint on an unframed linen canvas approximately 1.1 m tall and 84 cm wide.

The deep orange-ochre ground the work is painted on shows as a border around the edges of the canvas. Within it, a narrow rectangle, about 2 cm wide, has been painted freehand in black. Along the top edge and part way down the right side are short black lines poking inwards, each ending in a round black mass. They start small in the top left and grow larger.

Within the borders, the background of orange-ochre is covered in small yellow and grey dots.

Jarinyanu stands in the centre, a simplified black figure with round eyes and a wide mouth. He is decorated with grey and white markings, a band around his forehead, curved mirrored chest markings, a groin covering and stripes upon each upper thigh.

He is positioned straight on, arms raised to a long black beam running horizontally under his chin. It spans almost the entire width of the canvas. The beam is surrounded by finer vertical grey lines tipped with grey dots.

Filling the bottom of the portrait around Jarinyanu’s feet is a semi-circle of rows of numerous small black seated figures with round heads and outstretched arms.

Audio description written and voiced by Lucinda Shawcross