DECEASED Like many of her Pintupi tribeswomen, Makinti Napanangka began painting in 1994 during the women’s painting project organized for the Haasts Bluff and Kintore communities in the western desert of Australia.

This project, held at a female sacred site away from their men folk, marked a major development in contemporary desert art.

Many of the women who participated went on to gain wide public acclaim as successful, full-time painters for Papunya Tula Artists.

At this time Makinti was in her mid-sixties.

She had walked into the Haasts Bluff ration depot during the 1940’s with her young son.

By the time she had moved to the new settlement of Papunya, Makinti had also given birth to a daughter.

Later, as the outstation movement gained strength, she returned to settle five hundred kilometers west of Alice Springs at Tjukurla, close to Mangarri where she was born.

From the outset Makinti’s bright palette, impasto surfaces, and loosely worked geometric compositions attracted art buyers.

Her works were characterized by bold gestural linework evoking body paint applied onto women during ceremony by using fingers dipped in earth ochres.

Her paintings mimic the chanted narrative of her songline as she tracks and revivifies her two female ancestors, the Kungka Kutjarra, as they dance their way across the country.

Their travels follow the desert water sources, most especially Lupulnga, the rockhole where she was born and where her connections to her spiritual origins are felt.

In the painting on the right, designs associated with the site of Lupulnga, a rockhole situated south of the Kintore Community, The Peewee (small bird) Dreaming is associated with this site, as well as the Kungka Kutjarra or Two Travelling Women Dreaming.

During ancestral times a group of women visited this site, holding ceremonies associated with the area before continuing their travels north to Kaakuratintja (Lake MacDonald) and later the Kintore area.

The lines in the painting represent spun hair-string which is used in the making of nyimparra (hair-belts), which are worn by both men and women during ceremonies.

Although a tiny woman, Makinti commands a strength of purpose and a presence that has been vital in furthering the momentum of the desert painting community and is recognized as one of Papunya Tula’s leading artists.

Following several important solo exhibitions held at Utopia Art Sydney in 2000 and 2001 and at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, during the following year she was listed amongst Australia’s 50 Most Collectable Artists in Australian Art Collector Magazine.

She continued to be listed every year thereafter until 2007.

In 2008 she was awarded the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award and whilst not painting anymore, due to old age and illness, her work remains amongst the most collectable in the modern Aboriginal art movement and very hard to source.