Robert Ambrose Cole

(Australia 1959–Dec 1994)

Language group: Warramunga, Central Desert region

Title

Untitled

Place of origin

Alice Springs → Northern Territory → Australia

Year

1993

Media category

Painting

Materials used

synthetic polymer paint on paper on canvas

Dimensions

76.5 x 58.0 x 3.3cm stretcher

Signature & date

Not signed. Not dated.

Credit

Mollie Gowing Acquisition Fund for Contemporary Aboriginal Art 1993

Accession number

312.1993

Copyright

Location

Not on display

Further information

'I was born in Alice Springs. I paint my mother's and my father's country. My mother's country is Banka Banka, Warramunga people, north of Tennant Creek. Most of my paintings are from around Aputula, Finke, my father's country. His country is south of Alice Springs, the sand hills on the edge of the Simpson Desert ... My images come from all over the place.'

Robert Ambrose Cole was a self-taught artist who lived and worked in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Cole's style of painting was influenced by his years growing up in an urban centre, exposed to the art movements of the Central and Western Deserts. He experimented with both acrylic dot painting and the European-influenced landscapes of the Hermannsburg watercolourists, whose proponents included Albert Namatjira and Otto Pareroultja. While Cole maintained both forms of practice, their synthesis led to his shimmering white dot paintings, in which figures and shapes emerge. These works combine a translucency and subtlety, influenced by the watercolours, with Cole's obvious stylistic affinity with dot painting.

Cole often emulated natural ochres with acrylic colours. In 'Untitled', 313.1993, through careful placement and very subtle variations in the size of the dots, he builds up a pattern of square forms that appear within the field. This work's intensity is similar to op art, as the viewer tries to define the grid-like shapes that emerge and retreat into the oscillating white field painted over an ochre-brown background. The tracks of lines of dots that create the grid give an almost maplike appearance to the work as the eye charts a path across its surface. At the same time, the painting remains resolutely abstract and is not connected to a particular story and place.

In 'Untitled', 312.1993, Cote painted dots in lines that curve across the paper, defining two forms from the ochre background. These two shapes have been described in many ways: as deriving from ceremonial body markings; as suggesting the dramatic gorges that cut through rock formations in the desert near Mparntwe; or as recalling the shapes of hunting boomerangs. While these may all be possible sources or references in this work, the brown shapes are also abstract, grounded in both traditional Aboriginal culture and a very contemporary painterly experimentation with colour and form.

Wayne Tunnicliffe in 'Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia', Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004

Bibliography (5)

Hetti Perkins (Australia) (Author), Margie West (Australia) (Author), Theresa Willsteed (Editor), One sun one moon: Aboriginal art in Australia, Sydney, 2007, 56 (colour illus.).

Hetti Perkins (Australia) (Author), Theresa Willsteed (Editor), Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia, Domain, 2004, 40 (colour illus.).

Margo Neale (Australia) (Editor), Sylvia Kleinert (Australia) (Editor), The Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, South Melbourne, 2000, 562 (illus.). illus.no. 308

Margo Neale (Australia) (Author), Yiribana: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection, Sydney, 1994, 110, 111 (colour illus.), 136, 139. plate no .53

Victoria Lynn (Australia) (Editor), Australian Perspecta 1993, Sydney, 1993, 22.

Exhibition history (4)

Australian Perspecta 1993, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 06 Oct 1993–28 Nov 1993.

Gamarada, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 Nov 1996–16 Feb 1997.

Another Country, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 04 Jul 1999–02 Apr 2000.

Robert Cole, Utopia Art Gallery.

Collection

Robert Ambrose Cole