Born: c.1949-2019, Yuendumu, Northern Territory
Language: Warlpiri
Dreamings: Bush Tucker, Honey Ant, My Country
Rex Daniel Granites Japanangka was a senior Warlpiri man of Yuendumu, one of the largest remote communities in the Central Desert region, sitting 293 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs along the Tanami Road. His country was Mina Mina, roughly 160 kilometres west of Yuendumu out towards Lake Mackay, and he was a custodian for the Dreaming that belongs to that place. He also carried connections to the communities of Mount Allan and Willowra.
He was one of the most respected leaders of his generation. He served as President of the Yuendumu Council and sat on committees covering road safety and alcohol abuse in Central Australia. He was among the Warlpiri educators who built the bilingual education program at Yuendumu School in its early years, and he held a Bachelor of Education from Deakin University. Fluent in Warlpiri and English, he worked widely as an interpreter and translator, was an ordained pastor, and was called on often as a mentor and mediator. Most of his working life went into keeping Warlpiri language and law strong for the generations coming behind him.
Rex came from a family of painters and began working on canvas in 1988. He chose to paint independently of the community art centre, dealing directly with a small number of private galleries and dealers. His painting stayed close to the traditional way of working, built on classical Warlpiri iconography and the earthen colours of the desert, the ochres, reds, whites and blacks that come out of the country itself. Like many desert painters he worked from an overhead perspective, so a canvas opens out across country rather than looking into a horizon, and the sites and the tracks running between them sit in their true relationship to one another.
DREAMINGS
Honey Ant- Yurrampi, the honey ant, is one of the great ancestral stories of the Central Desert and one of the oldest food sources of the Warlpiri. The ants nest deep beneath the roots of mulga, and the workers hold nectar in swollen golden abdomens that make them living stores of sweetness. Digging for them is patient, careful work, done with crowbars and digging sticks in places where families have always known to look. The Dreaming travels through a stretch of country running east of Yuendumu, and holds within it the knowledge of where the nests are and how they are worked.
Bush Tucker - The desert feeds those who can read it. Seeds ground into damper, wild fruits and berries, bush onion, witchetty grub, honey ant and the game hunted across the sandhills and spinifex plains. The knowledge sits in the songs and the Dreamings rather than in any written record, and it is passed down by taking the young ones out on country and showing them. Rex painted the sites, the soakages and the seasonal movement of people across the land in search of food and water.
My Country - Mina Mina, west of Yuendumu towards the salt of Lake Mackay. Immense, ancient country of red sand, spinifex and low ranges that hold their colour differently through the day. This is land that has been sung and walked for many thousands of years, and every claypan, soakage and rise in it carries a name and a story. Painted from above, Rex's country becomes a map of belonging, the sites of ceremony and the long routes the ancestors travelled laid out across the canvas.
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Rex worked outside the community art centre system for his whole painting career, selling through private dealers rather than through public exhibition programs. His documented record is accordingly modest, and the following is what can be confirmed independently.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Aboriginal Art, International Art Studio, Belgrade, Serbia, 2010, exhibited alongside his wife Ida Granites Nangala
RECOGNITION
Centenary Medal, 2001, awarded for contribution to Australian society and government
COLLECTIONS
Private collections in Australia, Europe and the United States
This painting was purchased directly from Rex and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
