Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Kngwarrey) (c.1910–1996), Anmatyerre artist, was born at Alhalkere, Utopia Station in the Northern Territory. After her ancestral land was appropriated for cattle grazing, she worked as a stockhand. As she grew older she became a leader in women’s ceremonial business, experienced in ceremonial body painting. From 1977 she collaborated in the production of batik, an important industry for the Anmatyerre after they regained land title. She first painted on canvas in 1988. In the course of her brief career she produced thousands of canvases depicting the flowers, roots, dust and summer rains of her country, the translucent colours built up with layered touches of paint to create an illusion of depth and movement. In 1998 a retrospective exhibition of Kngwarreye’s work, Alhalkere – Paintings from Utopia, travelled to three state galleries and the National Gallery of Australia. Ten years later Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarrey, an exhibition of 120 of the artist’s works, showed in Osaka and Tokyo. With that exhibition, Kngwarreye was recognised as one of the very greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century.
Jenny Sages (b. 1933) came to Australia as a fifteen-year-old, trained in art in New York and travelled for some years before returning to live in Sydney, where she worked as a commercial illustrator for magazines including Vogue. At the age of fifty she went to the Kimberley, and significant aspects of her life up until that time simply fell away. She gave up commercial illustration to become a full-time artist, concentrating on abstract and landscape works. For more than twenty years she went out annually to ‘walk the land’ with women companions. On one of her early expeditions, she arranged to meet Emily Kngwarreye. Having charmed her way onto a plane with some German curators, she had to wait for four days for the older woman to turn up with her mob. Emily thought Jenny was as old as she was; they were about the same size; and Sages recalls that they sat and talked ‘as two eighty-three-year-olds do’. Sitting with Kngwarreye, Sages poured her impressions onto paper, annotating drawing after drawing with her sitter’s remarks. Back in her Sydney studio, she developed the huge, spare painting that became a foundation work for the Portrait Gallery. Along with it into the collection came the drawings that she made under the ‘talking tree’, capturing the changing expressions on the Anmatyerre woman’s face, her shifts between lively and impassive postures, and the things that she said as she first embraced, then tired of, the process.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 1998
© Jenny Sages
The portrait is of Anmatyerre woman, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, with her friend Lily. The painting was made by Jenny Sages in 1993, oil on canvas, and measures 2.16m tall by 1.85m wide, including its frame. The frame itself is discrete and simple, made from blond wood, and measuring about 2cm thick.
The portrait depicts Emily, close up, sitting cross legged, grounded on the earth, in the right foreground, and Lily, also sitting, some distance behind Emily, about half way up, and on the left edge of the picture. The focus and detail is on Emily, while Lily and the background landscape are less distinct. The warm orange-browns, yellows and whites, painted in loose, delicate brush strokes, shimmer and shine, capturing the heat of the day.
The background of the painting is flat and sparse, with no defined horizon, only a gentle gradient from lighter tones smudging together at the top, to darker shades in more defined strokes nearer the bottom.
Lily is shown at the very far left edge of the painting, her right side partially cropped. Her hair is a tangled mass of dark curls framing her round, dark skinned, face. Her face is angled slightly up to her left, as if she is turning towards Emily. Lily’s eyes seem to be on her friend and a smile plays over her closed lips. Lily wears a t-shirt, coloured in deep green-browns, with dashes of yellow where the light hits it. Her arms are loose with her hands resting, fingers just touching, in her lap. Lily is wearing a blue-green skirt and her bare legs are crossed.
On the ground between Lily and Emily is a pale grey-blue mass of lines which looks like the ashes of a small fire.
The portrait of Emily dominates the painting. Emily faces you directly, her head positioned straight on. Around her head, the brush strokes change from following the horizontal direction of the land in the background of the painting, to following the oval shape of her face, forming a sort of halo in whites and pale yellows. Emily’s white hair is cropped close to her skull, and her dark skin can be seen through it. Her forehead is high and elaborately furrowed – the furrows having their nexus at, and are most prominent where her brows, eyes, and nose meet. Emily’s eyes are dark crevices, the irises barely visible, surrounded by wrinkled skin. Her nose is large and smooth, with wide nostrils, and her ears are long and lie flat against her head. Emily’s cheeks are bunched up and deep lines run beneath them, between her nose and mouth. Emily’s lips are closed, with the lower slightly fuller than the upper - they are difficult to read, perhaps the glimmer of a smile is passing over them, or they may be set in resignation. Beneath the lips she has a small round chin, around this, her skin is loose and falls into the shadows of her creased neck.
Wound about Emily’s neck and tied loosely at her front, is a scarf, painted in fine brush strokes of pale yellows, orange-ochres and greens. Her top too, is made from many colours, - haphazard strokes in orange and yellow are layered and criss-cross each other in rich texture over her broad, rounded, and relaxed shoulders. These warm colours give over to lilac, mint-green, and black brush strokes, weaving together, and defining the volume and contours of her chest.
Emily’s elbows rest comfortably on the thighs of her crossed legs. Her bare forearms are covered in thick veins, her large, wrinkled hands come together at her shins, the left sitting lightly, partially over the right. Light falls on the hands, highlighting their creased skin, emphasising them. Emily’s skirt covers her crossed legs, and is white, with patches of bright orange-red and the suggestion of a floral pattern in greens and browns. Part of her left foot, in a white shoe, pokes out from under her right knee.
Audio description written by Lucie Shawcross and voiced by Emma Bedford
Come together and celebrate the rich history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Portrait Gallery collection.
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves: who we read, who we watch, who we listen to, who we cheer for, who we aspire to be, and who we'll never forget. The Companion is available to buy online and in the Portrait Gallery Store.
Australian writer Kate Grenville discusses her career and portrait by Jenny Sages.
