“I am a Western Aranda man. My family believe giant caterpillars called the Yeperenye became Tjoritja, the West MacDonnell Ranges in the distant past. The giant caterpillars entered through gaps in the ranges. I got all the ideas for the painting from my father, Ruben Pareroultja, because he was a Western Aranda man”.
One of the leaders of the Hermannsburg School of desert water-colour painting’s 21st Century revival, Hubert Pareroultja has died. He was nephew of the great Otto Pareroultja, the oldest of three brothers who were amongst the first generation to follow Albert Namatjira as watercolour landscape artists at the Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg/Ntaria. Otto was twelve years younger than Namatjira, and his work has been consistently compared with the master. Even in 1947, when he first began painting, there were those who suggested that Otto’s works resonated with that of European modernists such as van Gogh and Gaugin in that his work was distinguished by brilliant colour, dense patterning and ‘rhythmic pulsation’.
Hubert lived his life happily on his lands outside Ntaria at Kulpitharra outstation with his animals and stock, surrounded by the majesty of the West MacDonnell Ranges (Tjoritja). Country was at the heart of his painting practice. “He was an artist who painted what he saw, what he knew and what he felt, being his Country…His steady hand guided the brush through layered, translucent glazes of watercolour…There is a consummate understanding of the medium that allows every nuance of the landscape to be investigated”. So wrote Ken MacGregor this year in Hubert Pareroultja: When the rain tumbles down in July, his follow-up to a monograph on Albert Namatjira.
McGregor also writes about Pareroultja’s stockman days, his struggles with alcohol and his wasted years, then winning the Wynne prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. There was the sadness of several tragedies, including Pareroultja being stabbed multiple times, and the murders of his older brother, his younger brother and his only child.
As an innovative artist, Hubert continued the extraordinary tradition of the Hermannsburg watercolourists with a futuristic twist: his own idiosyncratic orbital landscapes and split images, showing two places at once, a fisheye view of ancestral lands he had visited as a child with his Uncle Otto and Albert Namatjira. In later years, Hubert travelled back to these painting outposts to check on the Ancestor trees made famous 50 years earlier by those masters. The 2022 Tarnanthi Festival in Adelaide had a room full of them twirling like dancing girls’ skirts. At Parrtjima, in the shadow of Tjoritj, they were brilliantly illuminated.
In 2020 Hubert was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of NSW and in 2021, working with Mervyn Rubuntja, was announced as the winner of the Wandjuk Marika 3D Award at the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin for Through the Veil of Time 2021, a life-size installation on silkscreen mesh. His paintings are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.
His exhibiting career began at Desert Mob in 2003 and extended right up to 2024 with ‘When the rain tumbles down in July’ at Nanda\Hobbs gallery in Sydney.
I’d also like to, note the death of arts leader Leon Paroissien AM, who was founding Director of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council (1974–1980). He was later Director of the fifth Biennale of Sydney (1984), then founding Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney with his lifelong partner, Bernice Murphy. At the Power Institute in 1984, he and Murphy organized an exhibition of Aboriginal art from Ramingining in the Northern Territory, which was subsequently purchased for the MCA.
