Desert Winter 1994

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s ‘Desert Winter’ seems to be a work made with acrylic on canvas, and the canvas acts as a field of exploration for the artist’s marks. There's this ochre haze, full of little jabs and dashes of paint, like the artist has touched the canvas lightly, as if feeling her way through Country. I think that Kngwarreye is such an interesting painter, because like me she came to painting later in life, and maybe that's why she just went for it—her paintings are deeply intuitive. I wonder what it was like for her making marks, choosing colors, and deciding when to stop—that final moment is always the hardest. Kngwarreye and other painters like Joan Mitchell invite us to move beyond fixed interpretations toward a more fluid and open-ended experience. The paintings are so free and they remind us of the exchange of ideas, where artists are in conversation with each other across time.